The cognitive science of religions’ By-Product Theory contends that much religious thought and behavior can be explained in terms of the cultural activation of maturationally natural cognitive systems. Those systems address fundamental problems of human survival, encompassing such capacities as hazard precautions, agency detection, language processing, and theory of mind. Across cultures they typically arise effortlessly and unconsciously during early childhood. They are not taught and appear independent of general intelligence. Theory of mind (mentalizing) undergirds an instantaneous and automatic intuitive understanding of minds, mental representations, and their implications for agents’ actions. By-Product theorists hypothesize about a social cognition content bias, holding that mentalizing capacities inform participants’ implicit understanding of religious representations of agents with counter-intuitive properties. That hypothesis, in combination with Baron-Cohen’s account of Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD) in terms of diminished theory of mind capacities (what he calls “mind-blindness”), suggests an impaired religious understanding hypothesis. It proposes that people with ASD have substantial limitations in intuitive understanding of and creative inferences from such representations. Norenzayan argues for a mind-blind atheism hypothesis, which asserts that the truth of these first two hypotheses suggests that people with ASD have an increased probability, compared to the general population, of being atheists. Numerous empirical studies have explored these three hypotheses’ merits. After carefully pondering distinctions between intuitive versus reflective mentalizing and between explicit versus implicit measures and affective versus cognitive measures of mentalizing, the available empirical evidence provides substantial support for the first two hypotheses and non-trivial support for the third.

宗教副产品理论的认知科学认为，可以用成熟的自然认知系统对文化的激活来解释许多宗教思想和行为。这些系统解决了人类生存的基本问题，包括诸如危险预防措施，机构检测，语言处理和心理理论等能力。在各种文化中，它们通常在儿童早期就毫不费力地，不自觉地出现。他们没有被教导并且看起来独立于一般情报。心智理论（心理化）提供了即时和自动的直观理解的思想，心理表征及其对代理人行为的影响。副产品理论家对社会认知的内容偏见进行了假设，认为心理能力会影响参与者对具有反直觉特性的特工的宗教代表的内隐理解。该假设与Baron-Cohen在心理能力理论（他称其为“盲目性”）下降方面对自闭症谱系障碍（ASD）的描述相结合，表明宗教理解假设受到了损害。它建议患有自闭症的人在对此类表示的直观理解和创造性推论上有很大的局限性。诺伦扎扬（Norenzayan）提出了一种盲目的无神论假说，该假说认为前两个假说的真实性表明，与普通人群相比，自闭症患者的无神论者可能性更高。许多实证研究已经探索了这三个假设的优点。在仔细思考直觉思维与反思思维之间，显性思维与隐性思维之间以及情感与认知心理思维之间的区别之后，现有的经验证据为前两个假设提供了实质性支持，而对第三个假设则提供了非平凡的支持。