Is Creationism my Father's Special Interest?
Currently, my father is building a massive spreadsheet which is intended to disprove evolution. He's spent hours writing code which was intended to disprove evolution. He spends much of his free time reading creationist books and watching creationist documentaries, often the same ones over again. He goes for the less obviously wrong old - Earth types — your Michael Behes and Stephen Meyerses, all those people at the Discovery Institute.
I don't know if my father is autistic. It certainly comes from his side of the family, but I have a higher dose of it than he does. Perhaps you'd say he's autistic, perhaps you'd say he's a shy and obsessive person with a recognizable pattern of quirks. Either way, his interest in creationism is deeply non - neurotypical.
He has little interest in the politics around creationism, he doesn't really want to convince other people of creationism. As long as I can remember, he's talked about it like a beloved but deeply cringe hobby, the way people talk about being into Linux or cosplaying. He loves creationism as a system of ideas and a collection of data. It gives him an excuse to make pretty spreadsheets. He's into creationism the way you might be into beetles or Dune lore.
It was only last year that I discovered my father is a Type of Guy. As I was walking to class, an old man appeared in front of me. He had an expressionless face and a certain lack of body language, eyes that didn't quite meet mine. In a monotone voice, he said had written a pamphlet about God, and that I really ought to read it.
Before I had really registered his words, I took his papers, and found a twenty page long infodump about abiogenesis and flood geology. It contained the URL of his website, which was full of text walls and beautiful charts about Biblical geneologies, all in 90s HTML glory. It was nonsense, of course, but you've got to respect the effort. Perhaps this is normal behavior for an autistic evangelical of a certain age.