Some 100,000 years ago, fifteen people, eight of them children, were buried on the flank of Mount Precipice, just outside the southern edge of Nazareth in today’s Israel. One of the boys still held the antlers of a large red deer clasped to his chest, while a teenager lay next to a necklace of seashells painted with ochre and brought from the Mediterranean Sea shore 35 km away. The bodies of Qafzeh are some of the earliest evidence we have of grave offerings, possibly associated with religious practice.

Although some type of belief has likely accompanied us from the beginning, it’s not until 50,000–13,000 BCE that we see clear religious ideas take shape in paintings, offerings, and objects. This is a period filled with Venus figurines, statuettes made of stone, bone, ivory and clay, portraying women with small heads, wide hips, and exaggerated breasts. It is also the home of the beautiful lion man, carved out of mammoth ivory with a flint stone knife and the oldest-known zoomorphic (animal-shaped) sculpture in the world.

We’ve unearthed such representations of primordial gods, likely our first religious icons, all across Europe and as far as Siberia, and although we’ll never be able to ask their creators why they made them, we somehow still feel a connection with the stories they were trying to tell. 

Left: The Venus of Dolní Věstonice (29,000 BCE — 25,000 BCE). Right: The Lion-man of the Hohlenstein-Stadel, between 35,000 and 40,000 years old. Source: Wikipedia. CC. 

We know that the spiritual foundations of humanity upon which we subsist today (Monotheism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism) were laid independently and simultaneously around 900 to 200 BCE, while the Middle Ages established present-day world religions throughout Eurasia. As history does, things moved fast from there. Eventually, water-powered paper mills replaced the laborious handcraft of Chinese and Muslim paper-making, while the printing press allowed for religious texts to spread rapidly, capturing the masses in the Reformation and breaking the monopoly of the literate elite. 

In 1560, King Philip II of Spain commissioned Juanelo Turriano, a clockmaker who specialized in movable figurative sculptures, a machine of prayer to beg  God to save his child from a deathly illness. “A miracle for a miracle,” he promised. Turriano was in charge of creating the earthly one that would pay for the second. He came up with the mechanical monk, a marvel of early automation. Its body can perform a variety of impressive actions, from moving his head, mouth, and eyes, beating his chest with his right arm and raising his left to lower the cross and rosary. What I find personally fascinating is that, even though the monk’s mechanisms were hidden beneath his cloak, some of the components were decoratively shaped. Away from human eyes but not from those of the divine.

    “[The mechanical monk] may have been created as an act of religious gratitude, but it stands (and walks and prays) as a tribute to human ability.” Lauren Davis, Gizmodo.

Turriano’s masterpiece doesn’t see a conflict between mechanics and art, automation and spirituality. It shows us, instead, a possibility. 

Even with the Industrial Revolution replacing most of the meticulous processes of carving and painting, allowing us to mass-produce objects (and icons) with little need for human intermediaries, it’s our drive that determines the direction of our creations. And we do the same with our rituals as we do with our icons. 

Mass communication now enables ceremonies and observances to be streamed on TV and online while messages of faith are spread via Twitter, making us question the way we practice religion and experience spirituality but also facilitating our access to them, especially for those who cannot leave their homes or travel to certain places.

Robots have always raised questions about divine creation and fears of dehumanization, transhumanism and even extinction. But they can also be perceived as intermediaries with the divine.

What does this mean for the development of AI? As automation permeates our lives, more and more every day, the question is not whether robotics and religion can co-exist. It’s how we can make both collaborate with each other in order to allow technology to help us become better, more connected people.

Left: Martin Luther’s 95 Theses which sparked off the Reformation. In only two years, Luther’s tracts were distributed in 300,000 printed copies throughout Germany and Europe. Wikipedia, CC. Right: Virgin Mary figurines for sale in San Francisco, California. Courtesy of Thom Masat, CC.

In this article, we’ll explore our practices in the context of the latest advances in robotics, their design and some interesting examples of theomorphic robots. 

Introducing Theomorphic Robots

If we look at the field of social robotics, we can see that most robots have been previously classified into three main categories based on the way they look (Dingjung Li et al.):

• Anthropomorphic: Robots with human and humanoid features, usually considered good for public assistance, business, research and healthcare;
• Zoomorphic: Robots that resemble animals, used more successfully in security, research, healthcare, education and entertainment; and
• Functional: Robots with a functional appearance designed according to their specific purpose and more appropriate for security and public assistance.

Gabriele Trovato, a researcher from Waseda University interested in exploring robotics in the context of religion, argues that this classification is incomplete because it doesn’t encompass the cases that fall between the three categories, nor does it account for robots inspired by plants and nature. 

The anthropomorphic robot RoboThespian, the zoomorphic Paro and the functional ARC Mate. Wikipedia, CC.