From Examiner:
"A recent post over at the Scientific American Mind and Brain blog has been getting a lot of attention in the past few days and not without reason. According to the column's author a graduate student from Belfast has found a correlation between those diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome, a high-functioning form of Autism known for poor sociality and narrow interests, and Atheism.
Specifically, this researcher asked participants to given open answers to questions regarding significant events in their lives and both groups - the atheists and those with Asperger's - ranked high in non-teleological answers. What this suggests on the surface is a similarity in thinking, some sort of shared cognitive process. I for one, have my doubts.
First, definitions.
Teleology is the study of purpose, from the Greek telos. If I were to show you long handled object with a blunt head and two rounded hooks protruding from the tip and ask you what it did, you would probably infer that it was meant to hammer nails - this is teleology, deciphering purpose.
When anthropologists attempt to determine whether a stone they found is a Oldowan stone-axe or a irregularly shaped rock, they must engage in teleological reasoning to reach an informed conclusion. At the same time when you ask a child "Why are rocks pointy?" their answer will invariably be along the lines of "so they can cut things."
Where things get interesting in psychology is where the developmental line between "Rocks are pointy so they can cut things" and "Rocks are pointy because, as mineral formations, they fracture along sharp divides, forming narrow ridges and points." Generally speaking, children are more likely to give a teleological answer to a question than an adult.
Where this is not true or at least not as true is areas of personal experience or importance. Ask an adult why they were the sole survivor of that car accident and you will rarely find someone who says it was luck, or gives some other "mundane" answer. More often you'll find them searching for purpose - telos. They were thrown clear of that accident because God has a plan for them, or they were supposed to survive because they had something left to accomplish, etc.
What this means for the study.
First of all, a warning: I write this based off my reading of a blog post which in turn was based off the memory of a talk delivered at a conference. Parity is not going to be high here. Hopefully we get some juicier details from the authors themselves in the near future, but in the meantime...
Finding that Asperger's patients engage in far less teleological reasoning than their "neurotypical" counterparts is very interesting. Drawing the connection from that to Atheism is a stretch. While true that both groups responded to questions in similarly non-purpose driven manners, one detail shears this tenuous connection.
The atheists, as expected, often invoked anti-teleological responses such as “there is no reason why; things just happen.” The people with Asperger’s were significantly less likely to offer such anti-teleological explanations than the atheists, indicating they were not engaged in teleological thinking at all. (The atheists, in contrast, revealed themselves to be reasoning teleologically, but then they rejected those thoughts.) [Emphasis mine]
Those with Asperger's may in some way simply not be conceiving of things teleologically (and a study between adult Asperger's and children Asperger's against neurotypical peers would be great to investigate this further) the Atheists in the study clearly do possess that function. Rather, they have made a conscious choice to disregard it in favor of more mechanical or naturalistic explanations.
To illustrate this with real events, consider two situations. Several months ago I was having a conversation with my sister while walking to the store. Just as we reach the corner of the street we need to cross, the light turned green and the walk sign lit up. Turning to me she said "Don't you just love that? I always feel like the light turns green just for me when that happens."
As a matter of fact I do love that, and I have often felt the same way. Now of course it isn't true, the light simply happened to turn green at that moment. In some deep recess in our minds however, we both saw an action - the light changing color - and derived a purpose - it wanted to, so we wouldn't have to slow our step. Not being idiots and having a basic understanding of how our local traffic lights work, we didn't believe this teleological answer and instead favored the mechanical explanation. We're traffic-light atheists you might say.
Religious people, along with other forms of magical thinking, are more often the ones who really do believe the traffic light changed for them - though not with quite such mundane events. (Which is why, I'm sure, the study this is all about asked people about significant events in their lives.)
Since we covered atheism with a real world example, we have another real world event that demonstrates precisely the opposite. In one of my earliest articles, Imagining Divinity, we looked at two very different cultures worlds apart, where two religious groups came to supernatural conclusions about the purpose of two natural events.
At the time the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) was struggling with whether or not to allow homosexual men to serve as pastors in their churches. During one of the days this debate was being had a tornado swept through the town damaging several buildings - including the conference center hosting the ELCA. One conservative pastor was quoted saying "The tornado in Minneapolis was a gentle but firm warning to the ELCA and all of us: Turn from the approval of sin. Turn from the promotion of behaviors that lead to destruction."
In other words the purpose of the tornado of the tornado was to send a warning. Examples of this can be found everywhere in religion, so it comes as absolutely no surprise that those who consciously reject religion also consciously reject the forms of thinking religion exemplifies - with the vast majority of the worlds population some manner of theist, the average "amount" of teleological thinking is going to be skewed in that direction.
Another way to look at it is, perhaps I'm putting the cart before the horse. Perhaps I should be saying the "amount" of teleological thinking is responsible for the high percentage of religious persons.
Either way, atheism and Asperger's may share an affinity for the mechanical and naturalistic, but an affinity is all it probably is."
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