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Chapter 13 - Autism and the Panoply of Religious Belief, Disbelief and Experience

from II.I - Clinical Conditions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 October 2019

By
Kelly Clark  and
Ingela Visuri
Edited by
Alasdair Coles  and
Joanna Collicutt
Alasdair Coles
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
Joanna Collicutt
Affiliation:
University of Oxford
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Summary

While the cognitive mechanisms that incline us towards theistic belief in superhuman agents have been well documented over the past 30 years, unbelief has only recently begun to receive attention. Recent studies suggest that, just as with theistic belief, various psychological mechanisms and processes, such as a propensity for analytic thinking, might incline one towards unbelief. Moreover, it has been suggested that atheism and analytic thinking may both be mediated by constraints presented in autistic individuals (Caldwell-Harris 2012; Clark 2019). In this chapter, we will present and evaluate a few studies relating to both unbelief and autism and then consider some additional ideas that we hope will contribute to a fuller understanding of possible approaches to religion and spirituality in autistic individuals.1

Type
Chapter
Information
Neurology and Religion , pp. 139 - 148
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2019

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