Tyler Cowen points me to some PDF, Religious Belief Systems of Persons rich in Functioning Autism, that has some fascinating results around the religiosity (or lack thereof) of individuals rich in functioning autism. I ve seen speculation concerning the peculiar mental profile of atheists before within the cognitive science literature, there s a reasonable quantity of social mental data around the different personality profile of atheists (e.g., more disagreeable). But there hasn t been lots of systematic analysis of the chance that autistic people may be atheist simply because they lack a completely fleshed theory of mindThat will make supernatural agents, gods, more plausible.
Read the entire paper yourself, however these two figures are the most crucial bits:
Both of these figures illustrate two results:
1) Among two equivalent demographic samples classified by autism diagnosis condition, our prime functioning autistics are more likely to become atheists.
2) Among an example of autistics and neurotypicals individuals who're atheists possess the greatest autism quotient.
I doubt this will surprise so many people. Furthermore, we have to be cautious about generalizing here. It appears likely that the huge proportion of high functioning autistics are atheists, but, that doesn t imply that an enormous proportion of atheists are high functioning autistics (though a bigger proportion compared to general population). Social context most likely matters too. Inside a nation like Estonia becoming an atheist is less deviant and nonconformist compared to the U . s . States. Estonian high functioning autistics may still be atheist, but a significantly more compact proportion of atheists in Estonia will be high functioning autistics.
Finally, there s another group that we think exhibits most of the same habits as atheists within the U . s . States: libertarians.
Note: I'm a libertarian-leaning atheist, just in case anybody cares.
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