Dear John,

This can be something of a stereotype. I think that when it’s true it’s because we can often only pay attention to one data stream or channel when people are speaking. Maybe if people are telling any of the various types of untruth, it’s more obvious by other channels…

Certainly, I used to assume that people were telling me the truth. I remember one day, almost certainly April 1 1987ish, when you spent several hours going round the school asking teachers for things like a “long weight” and “skyhooks” Eventually one teacher took pity on you and explained that it was a wild goose chase, and you didn’t know what one of those was either. It was probably pretty funny. You certainly thought it was funny when other people got sent for striped paint or something, because that was obviously fictional, but you didn’t have the skills to spot it when it was something that might exist.

There’s a much better story about this from St Thomas Aquinas though. He was known as “the dumb ox”, but was actually fantastically bright, prone to over-systematise stuff and didn’t always understand non-straightforward use of language. Maybe he was autistic; I don’t know. Anyway, allegedly one day his fellow monks told him they saw a pig flying past, and he ran to see it out of the window. They laughed at him; he replied “I would much rather believe that a pig might fly than that my brothers would lie to me.”

Since you’re 18, the key points of you learning to spot lies are still in the future. You are good at general knowledge. Of course you are; you have a near-photographic memory for stuff that interests you like administrative capitals of ancient empires and stuff. But a decent fraction of the stuff that you “know” isn’t true. Some of it was people just speaking off the top of their head without checking, like saying Kinder Scout is the highest point in England outside the Lake District (Cross Fell is 250m higher, for one). And some of it was people being deceptive.

I think a key moment was when i was 20 or so. I’d grown up believing in Young Earth Creationism, which I guess functioned then a bit like how conspiracy theories work now. I’d been sent lots of papers about how the Biblical and scientific evidence fit it really well. There was one key paper about how radioactive dating for rocks didn’t work in the way that “normal science” says it should.

Anyway, I came across that paper again as someone who’d done a few years of physics at Cambridge, and I realised that the answer to the calculations looked unlikely and they’d missed an important factor. So I reran them and found they were wrong – that actually he hadn’t disproved radioactive dating for rocks, and it worked fine.

I somehow ended up in correspondence with the author of the original paper, who was a proper academic at a proper university in a different science subject, and who was doing Creation Science as a hobby. He admitted my maths was probably right, but didn’t back down from his conclusions about radioactive dating.

And it was at that point I realised that a lot of people don’t follow the evidence wherever it leads. They come to the best conclusion they can, maybe on the basis of the available evidence, maybe on the basis of what is most advantageous for them, then they invest themselves in an option, they defend it to the hilt, and interpret all other evidence on the basis of what they’ve already decided. It’s true in science, in politics, in economics and history and theology and loads of other fields of study.

I don’t do that, not normally, but most people seem to, to the point that they can’t tell whether they are telling the truth or not – it’s what feels like truth to them. I’m so fed up of being “lied” to and taken in, whether that’s intentional or not, that I actually come across as pretty cynical now.

A couple of years ago, I was at an inspirational talk given by a well known bishop. He said “of course in the Greek, this verse in 1 Thessalonians says X.” So I checked. It didn’t say anything like that. Any respect I had for the bishop completely evaporated almost immediately. He was lying about what the Bible said to support a point that he wanted to make. That’s the exact opposite of what Christian preachers are meant to do.

Pretty much whenever I hear “science says that X” or “the Bible says that Y”, my default reaction is now to check it out. And because I’ve spent far too many years of my life at university, and got pretty good results there in a wide variety of subjects, I am often qualified to check it out. And often people’s claims just don’t hold water.

This has in fact been the pattern of a fair bit of my life.

• I am taught that the Bible teaches that X is true. I believe it.
• I realise that the Bible doesn’t actually teach X as clearly as people say it does.
• I realise that actually the Bible doesn’t teach X at all. I stop believing it.
• The group that I was part of when I believed X now sees me as a bit suspect.
• I realise that most Christians never actually believed X anyway.

So to come back and address the title of this letter, I guess this autistic person started off easy to deceive, but is now pretty difficult to deceive and doesn’t trust people if they try, whether or not they intend to.

But I think the underlying stereotype has value, and probably explains why autistic people often seem to get stuck in conspiracy theories and cults.

All the best,

Future John