Ateísmo & Autismo
Olhando para trás, desde minhas primeiras interações com ateus e céticos, até hoje, observando a reação e a forma de expressão das pessoas aqui no fórum, me veio em mente uma associação extremamente coerente e que sempre esteve na minha cara - os recorrentes traços autísticos presentes na forma de pensar e de se expressar dos ateus e dos céticos. Desde a incapacidade de lidar bem com metáforas, conteúdos simbólicos, mitos e representações, até a necessidade de pensamento completamente concreto e objetivo, sempre receoso de abstrações e comportamentos sociais não-justificados, passando pela incapacidade de conceber um criador e de visualizar.
Eu me tornei ateu com 12 anos de idade (até então não conhecia o pensamento neoplatônico, estoico, hermético etc. Só fui conhecer mais tarde participando no rosacrucianismo). Via o comportamento religioso como ilógico, e não entendia muitos de seus aspectos, e também tinha muita dificuldade em compreender e lidar com o comportamento social dos neurotípicos. Até então, eu não havia precisado de filosofia, de leitura, de referências, de nada. Pensar de forma cética era simplesmente o
modus operandi natural para mim, meu raciocínio era completamente lógico, concreto, objetivo, matemático.
Fui pesquisar sobre teses e trabalhos a respeito, e descobri que já foram conduzidas várias pesquisas e trabalhos acadêmicos a respeito -
In the last decades, evolutionary psychologists have proposed that a propensity to believe in a supernatural power derives from something very fundamental: humans’ highly developed mentalizing abilities, which are part of our evolutionary heritage and are believed to have evolved to help us live in complex social groups. Mentalizing abilities include our frequent need to imagine what others’ are thinking, and our tendency to anthropomorphize. We may jump to conclusions such as believing that damage to our property was purposefully caused by that neighbor we’ve been arguing with, rather than thinking it was caused by some natural event or accident. Evolutionary psychologists such as Scott Atran, Justin Barrett, and Jesse Bering have proposed that believing that a supernatural being was active in events around us is only one step removed from this kind of daily inference about others’ motives.
In most religions, and arguably anything worth being called a religion, God is not just an impersonal force or creator. He has a mind that humans can relate to. Maybe you’re not gossiping on the phone with him late at night, but he has personality traits, thoughts, moods, and ways of communicating with you. If you didn’t know what a mind was or how it worked, not only would you not understand people, you would not understand God, and you would not be religious.
That’s the theory, anyway. Scientists who study religion have come to agree that belief in God (or gods) relies on everyday social cognition: our ability—and propensity—to think about minds. (See chapters 6 and 7 of my book The 7 Laws of Magical Thinking.) Which means if you are autistic, and unable to “mentalize,” you would be an atheist. New research published today in PLoS ONE provides fresh evidence for this claim.
One outcome of the ability to mentalize is the ability to think teleologically—to see the purpose of objects or events. (Rocks and rainstorms have no purpose, but shovels and showering do.) I found one blog post by a woman with Asperger’s syndrome who wrote that as a child, "The world I perceived was a random, self-sufficient system. It wasn’t built; it grew."
When people see an event as divine intervention, or a result of intelligent design, they’re just letting their teleological bias run amok. They’re attributing purpose where there is none. Bethany Heywood, in collaboration with Jesse Bering, found in her Ph.D. research that even atheists tend to say that certain things happened to them “for a reason,” e.g., to teach them a lesson. But subjects with Asperger’s gave significantly fewer teleological responses than a control group did, and several even expressed confusion regarding the questions about purpose. One, misinterpreting a prompt for “a coincidence you saw meaning in,” wrote, “in practical application, I wear nice clothes and make my hair presentable. Coincidentally people are more friendly towards me.”
Religion is a cross-cultural universal for more reasons than just the tendency to infer humanlike causation even in ambiguous circumstances. Religion serves powerful social needs, such as belonging to a group and obtaining the benefits of in-group altruism. This has been eloquently argued in David Sloan Wilson’s book Darwin’s Cathedral. Although all humans are social beings, with social needs and social abilities, people differ widely in their social interests and skills. Some want primarily a romantic partner and a friend or two. Others enjoy having a large network of friends. Some people enjoy chit chat with a stranger at a bus stop, while others find such activities pointless. One of the characteristics of autism is what is typically referred to as “social impairments.” For people with Asperger’s, this may mean weaker social skills, decreased interest in socializing, or more socializing that is restricted to people with similar interests. The implications for religious belief and Asperger’s is that individuals with Asperger’s may find religion to be less relevant to their lives because they don’t mind skipping the social benefits that accompany participation in a religious community.
An important next step is to try to link one or more of the specific reasons for not believing in God with individuals’ actual reasons for self-identifying as atheist or agnostic. These reasons are: lower mentalizing abilities, lower social abilities or decrease social orientation, and reduced tendency for social conformity and social learning in childhood. We might expect different types of religious behavior to co-occur with lower mentalizing vs. lower social abilities or reduced tendency for social conformity. The last of these, for example, might be expected to lead to people constructing their own religious system. Less need for social interaction might lead to a lack of interest in religious activity, without any special emphasis on disbelief in God. Lower mentalizing, if accompanied by high emphasis on logical reasoning (or systemizing ability, see the work by Simon Baron-Cohen), could lead to rejection of religion for “not making sense,” similar to what occurs with scientifically minded individuals who reject religion because it conflicts with a materialist worldview (as evidenced by the high number of scientists who are atheists).
Fontes:
http://www.scienceandreligiontoday.com/2011/09/26/why-are-high-functioning-autistics-more-likely-to-be-atheists-or-agnostics/https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/psyched/201205/does-autism-lead-atheismhttp://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0036880&type=printablehttp://csjarchive.cogsci.rpi.edu/proceedings/2011/papers/0782/paper0782.pdf
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