Being a “biblical scholar,” having an interest in robots might seem counter-intuitive. I was intrigued by the topic as a youngster, but convinced that if what the Bible said was true it deserved nothing less than full attention, I let my formal study of science lapse (although I kept an active reading life on it). Now, through the interest of my daughter, I have found myself mentoring budding young engineers, mostly by helping put things away and correcting grammar. Yesterday we took our robots outside for the local street fair. Almost always the response we get from local people is “Robots? Our school has robots?” Well, partly correct. The schools house the robots, but our robotics club is largely self-funded, so the robots might be said to belong to the team rather than the school. In any case, yesterday the robots played soccer in the street for the amusement of festive fair-goers.

People often fear “soulless machines.” They run by predetermined rules, set down explicitly in computer code, and do only what they are programmed to do. Some fear artificial intelligence for this very reason: what if robots or computers are programmed to think? Does this make them something more than physical machines? The standard, religiously biased, answer is that the soul, or even mind, is a uniquely human possession. Animals may act on instinct, some may qualify as having a limited mind, but definitely not souls. That would simply cross too many boundaries. When asked to produce a human soul for scientific scrutiny all religions come up blank. We don’t actually know what a soul might be – an everliving component that God might throw into Hell or spoil in Heaven seems to be the general gist. And it makes our moral choices for us.

In the Bible if any animal (say a bull) gores a person to death, and that bull had a prior reputation, not only beast but master could be put to death. It seems that the bull has a bad moral intention. If robots hurt people, in violation of Asimov’s first law of robotics, they are treated as acting with moral intention. We project souls onto them for the convenience of condemnation. If an animal, such as a zoo gorilla, saves a human child, that animal receives the treatment of a souled being for a while, until the act is forgotten. It seems that souls are immaterial components of a closed system used to reward or punish an individual. How much of themselves do humans have to put into their robots before they can have souls as well?

Robots among the people