A Theology of Robots

Furse went further when in 1986 he published a paper in the Dominican journal "New Blackfriars" entitled "The Theology of Robots", and argued that at some point in the future it would be possible to build intelligent robots, and some of these would have religious experiences and pray. Interestingly, Alistair Hardy, who conducted extensive research into the nature of religious experience at his unit based in Oxford, believed that there was a part of the brain responsible for this common human experience. Hardy, and later David Hay at Nottingham, showed that about 48% of the population of Britain had religious experiences of some kind or other, even though few of these people go to church.

Furse, recently whilst at the 7th Mind and Brain Symposium in London (The Science of Consciousness: the nature of religious experience) took this a stage further in the discussion (he was not a speaker), and argued that it would be possible ultimately to understand the workings of Hardy's "religious experience centre" in the brain, and to build it into robots as part of their brains. Then, with suitable learning through their upbringing, there would be Christian robots, Buddhist robots, and atheist robots. In short, Furse argues that robots will pray!

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