(I posted this over on Reddit's AskPhilosophy community but didn't get much of a response, so I figured I would try my luck here.)

According to Wikipedia, apophenia is a term that was coined by the psychiatrist Klaus Conrad, defined as "unmotivated seeing of connections [accompanied by] a specific feeling of abnormal meaningfulness." I was struck by the way this concept seems to pathologize certain forms of meaning-making, drawing a line between legitimate and illegitimate interpretations of reality. I also suspect that this demarcation is grounded in a broadly secular perspective, wherein the legitimacy of an interpretation hinges on how well it fits within a physicalist ontology.

I was reading Reason Revisited: The Philosophy of Karl Jaspers by Sebastian Samay, and I encountered this quote:

Elsewhere, Jaspers expresses the same idea by saying that 'being-there (Dasein) and being-symbol (Symbolsein) are like two dimensions of one and the same world: in the former the world reveals itself to general consciousness, in the latter to Existence.' This double life of the world cannot be seen by the intellect which only looks for its facticity: it can be discovered only from the vantage point of existential faith. Unlike the intellect, the vision of faith has the power to loosen up the facticity and determinateness of positive objects, so that they may become more fluid symbols for existential concern, ciphers through which God may trans-appear.

The perspective here -- that of moving beyond the facticity of objects toward deeper meanings -- seems to be at odds with a worldview that circumscribes the allowable interpretations of an object or event. Have any philosophers written about this tension? Are there metaphysical assumptions embedded in the concept of apophenia, and if so, is this problematic?