This is an interesting claim that seems to me to be quite wrong, but maybe that’s because I have exactly the kind of mind-blindness it’s talking about…Except I think I have good reason to think I don’t, which is why the claim seems to me to be quite wrong. I could go around like this all day.
The claim is a comment on a post of Chris Stedman’s giving five reasons it’s a bad idea for atheists to call religion a form of mental illness.
Yes, there is a link between autism and atheism. It’s been found that many autistic people are atheists. This explains why many atheists (who might be suffering from autism) are quiet in real life (due to the obvious social difficulties and interactions of being autistic) but very vocal on the internet letting their frustration out on immaterial concepts that they are unable to understand.
Autistic people do not view emotions and other immaterial concepts such as the prime-mover (which is fully established in philosophy and logic) the same way as regular people which explains why many become atheists as they unable to perceive God as a immaterial being and instead see him as a”sky-daddy” which is a juvenile view of the prime-mover that the great philosopher Aristotle argued for in Ancient Greece whose argument continues to this day.
That could be true. It makes internal sense. But of course it begs the question; it assumes that there really is such a thing as “God who is an immaterial being” and that it’s only a brain defect that prevents people from perceiving it.
Also, viewing emotions differently from the way non-autistic people do isn’t the same as not perceiving them at all. Some emotions have visible manifestations. You can’t say the same about “God” – it’s not as if a really intense version of “God” is visible to everyone.
The background idea though is familiar, and interesting. We have only the equipment we have. We have zero reason to think the equipment we have is able to perceive everything there is; in fact we have abundant reason to be aware that it doesn’t. It could be the case that there really is a thing we would call “God” if we could perceive it, that we just can’t perceive because we don’t have the organs to do the job.
It could be. It doesn’t follow though that the stories humans have been telling about their imagined gods for millennia have anything to do with that possible “God.”