The Belief Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny, and the Meaning of Life (11 page)

We can’t help but get the distinct impression from such descriptions that theism in autistic people is somehow different from the garden-variety version. It’s not that autistic religion isn’t theologically sophisticated. On the contrary, these writers’ religious views are extraordinary. When I met with Schneider at a public library to discuss his beliefs with him in person, he had a colossal, self-published tome tucked under his arm, a document riddled with complicated mathematical formulas, which he was convinced showed clearly how God was busy at work in the quantum universe. (It may well have been just what he said it was. But given my own shameful impoverishments in the subject of physics, the document was almost entirely incomprehensible to me.)

Yet at least in the autobiographies of autistic individuals, God, the cornerstone of most people’s religious experience, is presented more as a sort of principle than as a psychological entity. For autistics, God seems to be a faceless force in the universe that is directly responsible for the organization of cosmic structure—arranging matter in an orderly fashion, or “treating” entropy—or He’s been reduced to cold, rational scientific logic altogether. To Schneider, instead of the emotional correlates of church ritual that so often engender the physiology of spiritual awakenings (what University of Oxford anthropologist Harvey Whitehouse calls “sensory pageantry”),
¹³
Catholicism is more an anxiety-reducing medium with its formal, predictable procedures and the clarity of its canons. It gives almost step-by-step instructions, telling the autistic how to behave in a very threatening, confusing social world and affording them some degree of control.

What is noticeably missing in the preceding accounts is a sense of interpersonal relations between the autistic individual and God. It’s almost as if the algorithmic strategies used to deal with other people—such as the lady at the ATM machine—spill over into the authors’ religious beliefs as well. Rather than an emotional dependence or rich social relationship with God, deductive logic is used to lay the groundwork for understanding existence and to impose order on a chaotic world. The sense of the
numinous
, or spiritual “otherness,” inherent in most people’s religious beliefs is conspicuously absent in the autistic.

All this is to say that, for autistics, God may be a behavioral rather than a psychological agent. If this is indeed the case, then people with autism should be less inclined to see natural events as carrying some type of subtle, hidden message. For example, a lonely, single man with autism might pray for a wife but will not be able to decode the symbolic device—a natural event—by which God “responds,” such as a female friend’s husband leaving her for another woman. A nonautistic, religious observer might interpret this to be God’s “wanting” the man to be with this female friend, and thus view God as having intentionally set up this chain of social events as a way to respond to the man’s prayer; yet, because of his theory-of-mind impairments, the autistic man wouldn’t easily infer God’s intentions in this episode. Indeed, one man with Asperger’s syndrome inquired on an Internet bulletin board whether others with the disorder were like him, “conscious of no feedback from the divine.” If God communicates in the subtle language of natural events, it’s no wonder that people on the autistic spectrum would so often fail to pick up on His communicative messages.

On the other side of the clinical coin from autism is the disorder of paranoid schizophrenia, in which the term “paranoid” captures the essence of a theory of mind gone completely wild. These individuals see personal signs and messages in nearly everything. The experience of
apophenia
(seeing patterns of connections in random or meaningless events) that is more or less endemic to the psychology of these patients is especially telling. For example, University of Edinburgh psychiatrist Jonathan Burns writes,

But even cognitively normal, nonschizophrenic people often have trouble
not
seeing hidden messages in natural events. One of the things that has always intrigued me about human psychology is the fact that our minds so often make decisions without first consulting our knowledge and beliefs. A scientifically headed, otherwise rational person can say with absolute conviction and sincerity, “I do not believe.” And yet, when the conditions are just right, the physiology, emotions, even behavior of such individuals would seem to say otherwise. Very often, we’re entirely unaware of these contradictions in our thoughts, or at least circumspection is rare. But every now and then, there’s something of a collision between the rational and the irrational.

In my case, I tend to become most acutely aware of the fact that my mind has a mind of its own whenever some coincidence of events serves to trigger thoughts of my dead mother. Yes, she “lives in my heart,” metaphorically speaking. But whatever is left of Alice Bering—those smiling, laughing eyes that welled up so quickly with giant teardrops; her sense of humor; fingers that would rake gently against the scalp of my feverish head when I was a boy; the worried knot between her brows that reflected unspoken despair; even the cancer that took this all furiously away—has for ten years been turning to dust in a satin-lined, walnut casket buried six feet beneath the Florida sun–soaked earth in the middle of a crowded Jewish cemetery.

Now, I believe, without any tremor of agnostic hesitation, that the whole of my mother’s existence is presently encapsulated as a fragile artifact in this lonely tomb. I also believe that her mental life ended before my eyes in one great, exasperated sigh on a grim January evening in 2001, “like the light ash of a butterfly wing incinerated in a forest fire,” as Camus said about his long-dead father.
¹⁵
On several occasions since then, however, I’ve caught myself in a rather complicated lie, one in which, at some level, I’ve leapt to the conclusion that my mom still has a very active mental life—which, of course, I can perceive only by using my theory of mind.

During the long sleepless night that followed in the wake of her death, for instance, my own mind registered the quiet harmony of the wind chimes jingling outside her bedroom window, and I’d be lying if I said that my first thought was not that she was trying to communicate a gentle message to me in the guise of this sweet device. I did not
believe
this to be the case; I knew very well that, at that very instant, her body was probably being fussed over by a coroner’s assistant in scrubs miles away. But my beliefs at that moment were irrelevant. My brain happily bypassed them and jumped to translation mode:
she’s telling me everything is okay
.

Yale University philosopher Tamar Gendler recently coined the term “alief” to describe just this sort of quasi belief—more primitive than a full-fledged belief or even imagination—in which a mental state is triggered by ambient environmental factors, generating very real emotional and behavioral responses, but the person experiencing that mental state isn’t convinced that the trigger reflects something
true.
¹⁶
Another way to say this is that the person’s mind is somehow tricked by environmental cues that, in the ancestral past, would usually have been associated with adaptive responses. A clearer example of the experience of alief is offered by University of Oxford psychologist Ryan McKay and philosopher Daniel Dennett in their 2009
Behavioral and Brain Sciences
article,

An even simpler explanation for my reaction to the wind chimes than that of alief is merely to say that part of me wanted there to be an afterlife, that we see what we want to see, and so my desire to believe that my mom’s spirit somehow survived her bodily death simply short-circuited the rationality of my materialist beliefs. Yet sheer emotionalism is likely an inadequate account in such instances. After all, many animals become emotionally distraught over the death of a loved one.
¹⁸
But without theory of mind, human beings could not perceive the dead as intentionally sending them telegrams in the protean shapes of natural events—such messages, after all, are perceived as coming directly from the spirits’ minds. My mom
wanted
me to
know
that she had cleared customs in heaven (or some such).

Still another explanation for my reaction to the wind chimes, and the one preferred by cognitive scientists such as Justin Barrett from the University of Oxford and Stewart Guthrie of Fordham University, is that such psychological responses result from the activation of a “hyperactive agency detection device” by unexpected movements in the environment.
¹⁹
This position holds that, because of the ever-present threat of animal (and other human) predators in the ancestral past, human minds evolved a sort of hair-trigger device to identify movement or sound as being caused by a dangerous creature (or some other potentially deadly entity), rather than assuming that it’s coming from something more innocuous (such as the wind). Often we’re wrong—I’ve mistaken plenty a garden hose for a snake—but from the gene’s point of view, erring the other way around would be a much costlier error, and it’s better to be safe than sorry. So when it comes to something like wind chimes moving presumably of their own accord, the absence of an actual threatening physical being to explain the cause of the event instinctively conjures up the thought of a nonphysical being, such as a ghost.

But this account, too, is inadequate to explain my reaction to the wind chimes. To begin with, it completely overlooks my theory of mind. This wasn’t just my mother’s aloof, restless ghost playing around out there because she had nothing better to do. Rather—at least for my secret, illogical twin who had apparently pirated my scientific brain in this instance—she was using the objects to give me a personal message, what appeared to be a peaceful ode, a meaningful whisper, about her safe passage to the other side. In effect I was putting myself in my dead mother’s shoes, employing my theory of mind to try to decipher the mental reasons for her actions. Without a theory of mind, there would just be the sound of wind chimes. And with a mere hyperactive agency detection device, it would just be her moving them.

To perceive any event as meaningful, or otherwise “standing for” the unobservable mental states presumed to be causing them, requires a theory of mind. There must be some intentional purpose, some intelligent reason, for the event to transpire. And this is just as true when we perceive meaning in mindless natural events such as hurricanes, plagues, earthquakes, and wind chimes as it is when we’re reasoning about other (living) people’s everyday social behaviors. “What’s this about?” we immediately ask ourselves. “Why is God (or our dead mother) doing this?” It is especially telling that the question of
how
God acts on the universe—rather than simply
why
He does so—so seldom arises in people’s thoughts. If a believer were diagnosed with cancer, for example, it would be rather unusual for the person to dwell on how God went about causing his or her cells to turn physically malignant. Did He use His hands? Telepathy? And if He used telepathy, does that mean He has a physical brain? That such questions of actual physical causality—how God goes about converting His intentions into palpable events in the physical world—sound so odd to us betrays their psychological unnaturalness. They’re hardly the stuff of church sermons anyway.

Our human penchant for seeing meaningful signs in unexpected natural events is something that many New Age belief systems have exploited to great (and profitable) effect. For example, a leading figure in the “angel-oriented therapy” business is a California woman named Doreen Virtue, who at the time of this writing has sold three-quarters of a million copies of her book
Messages from Your Angels
(2003). And if you pay $150 a mortal head to attend one of her all-day workshops, Virtue will tell you that when you simply believe and tune into the ambient static of humdrum life all around you, you, too, will be able to pick up the clear signals of your friendly guardian angels, fairies, chakras, dead folks, and goddesses. Her publicist also advertises that, as a special treat, Virtue’s clairvoyant son, Charles (who is curiously leading his own “angel certification program” in Germany), “will teach about a newly discovered archangel who assists you in making powerful and amazing changes in your life.”
²⁰
Amazing indeed.

Virtue’s books are mostly compendiums of untempered anecdotes: enthusiastic, first-person testimonials from people who are absolutely convinced that invisible beings are in regular contact with them. In Virtue’s latest book,
Signs from Above
(2009)—coauthored by her son—an ambivalent woman describes how she deferred to the advice of an angel with a feather fetish in making an important life decision.