Born This Way?
The relationship between autism spectrum disorder and atheism undercuts a key tenet of Christian theology
Central to Christian theology is the idea that humans were made, not just in God’s image, but with the capacity to know Him. According to Billy Graham, “God created us for one reason: to know Him and love Him and have fellowship with Him.” (It’s been a while since I’ve had a math class, but that sounded like three reasons.)
Anyhoo, the ubiquity of religious experience across cultures has led some scientists to wonder if the capacity for such experiences is genetic. Dean Hamer’s book The God Gene makes just such a claim. Contra scientists like Scott Atran and Pascal Boyer, who argue that religious stories and rituals are by-products of cognitive architecture that evolved for other reasons, Hamer is convinced that spirituality is an adaptation, that it serves our genetic fitness.
Obviously, if you are a Christian who believes that we were created to know God, you would have a field day with Hamer’s thesis.
But what if some people weren’t hard-wired to experience God, or at least not the personal God of the Judeo-Christian tradition? What if, for such people, religious experience was possible but not guaranteed, and far more likely to revolve around impersonal…
