In our world, religion and robotics may be regarded as distinct areas of human activity. In fact, they are not only deemed distinct, but also oppositional: it is widely acknowledged that here is little room for “the divine” in the realm of scientific investigation and technological development, and robotics is not considered an exception. However, in some ways, this intuitive categorization appears to be stereotyped and superficial. Generally speaking, it is straightforward to observe that, if one focuses on the study of religion and its impact on human cognition and societies as addressed by anthropologists, social scientists, psychologists, cognitive scientists or other human-centered research disciplines, the opposition with robotics research is only apparent. All these disciplines obviously share with robotics (and with research and technological development in general) a sound experimental approach, which is based on the formulation of hypotheses, the collection of data, and then the statistical analysis of such data to verify if hypothesis shall be accepted or rejected. A-priori opposition towards the convergence of religions and robotics ignores the past, the present and possibly the future of the multiple, non-obvious connections that they share.

The past teaches us that both religion and robotics share the objective of understanding humans and—to some extent—the dream of building an artificial human. There is evidence of such archetypes in many ancient cultures in the world, from Greece to China. These representations have had positive as well as negative connotations, with differences normally relating to the specific cultural and religious background of the civilizations. More recently in the human history, questions about the nature of “conscience” and “free will” have been equally addressed by theologians and philosophers of mind, and in the last 50 years have become subject of investigation by AI and robotics experts as well, giving birth to a wide corpus of literature. This shows that, if the explanations provided by theology and computational cognitive models are likely not to be the same, they indeed may share somehow overlapping objectives.