Free The Belief Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny, and the Meaning of Life by Jesse Bering

see that their sons and daughters display obsessive-compulsive interests clustering around machines and physical systems. These children tend to become thoroughly enamored with what might seem to the rest of us the most eccentric of hobbies: collecting patterned light filaments, systematically dismantling old Polaroid cameras and television remote controls, accumulating encyclopedic knowledge of nineteenth-century railway transport engines. This tendency to become transfixed by surface causes may help us understand why, in families where autism appears to run in the bloodline, professions such as engineering, accounting, and the physical sciences tend to be curiously overrepresented in the genealogy.
    In some cases, it seems, this form of physical causal expertise is very practically translated to social problem solving. That is to say, many autistics get by perfectly fine in the real world by exploiting their heightened knowledge of surface-level behaviors, never having to really think about the confusing mental states underlying other people’s actions. University of Sheffield psychologist Digby Tantum gives this intriguing example of a woman with Asperger’s syndrome trying to navigate her way around the use of a crowded ATM machine:
    She had observed that when people lined up, they left a gap between themselves and the person in front, and that this gap was substantially larger in the case of men standing behind women. She used this information to jump lines, looking for this combination and pushing in behind the woman nearest the front who was followed by a man. 6
     
    This woman’s understanding of the way people work was motivated by a desire to learn how they typically behaved in this particular social setting, not their mental reasons for doing so. Only by assessing and becoming extraordinarily sensitive to the way routines and conventional social rules intersect with people’s overt behavior could she enter the social environment, albeit inappropriately in this instance—she still couldn’t understand why those waiting patiently in line behind her would get so angry.
    Several autobiographical accounts provide fascinating glimpses into the autistic person’s view of God. And because, as we’ve now seen, reasoning about God is fundamentally about using our evolved theory of mind to think about God’s mental states, it’s perhaps not surprising that these writings appear to reflect a very different kind of God than the conventionally maudlin version most of us are more familiar with. For instance, in her book Thinking in Pictures: And Other Reports from My Life with Autism (1996), the autistic scientist and writer Temple Grandin speaks of her lifelong struggle with her belief in God:
    It is beyond my comprehension to accept anything on faith alone, because of the fact that my thinking is governed by logic instead of emotion. 7
     
    In high school I came to the conclusion that God was an ordering force that was in everything. I found the idea of the universe becoming more and more disordered profoundly disturbing. 8
     
    In nature, particles are entangled with millions of other particles, all interacting with each other. One could speculate that entanglement of these particles could cause a kind of consciousness for the universe. This is my current concept of God. 9
     
    Another case comes from autistic mathematician and computer programmer Edgar Schneider’s Discovering My Autism (1999). In chapters devoted to his religious beliefs, Schneider writes,
    My belief in the existence of a supreme intelligence (or, if you will, a God) is based on scientific factors. 10
     
    It must be pointed out explicitly that none of this [religious beliefs] has any emotional underpinnings, but is totally intellectual in its nature. 11
     
    To me, as far as adherence to a religion (or any other type of ideology) is concerned, intellectual conviction is a condition that mathematicians call “both necessary and sufficient.” My