Searching for the Gods’ Minds the Hard Way

The only exceptions that prove principles are those whose exceptional status those principles explain. People with autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) tend to be more attentive to details, more likely to apprehend events mechanistically, and more inclined to systemize about both than does the general population. Considerable evidence suggests that they are also far less likely to possess ready intuitions about the workings of people’s minds and that even high-functioning people with ASD are mindblind. If the by-product theory of religious representations is correct, then people with ASD will lack intuitive insight about religious representations of gods as minded agents and find creative inferences with them challenging. Theorists differ about how extensive such limitations will be, especially in light of the ability of some people with ASD to laboriously piece together a partial, ersatz theory of mind over time. Overall the available empirical research mostly corroborates these proposals about these limitations.