Can a robot believe in God?

Gabriele Trovato and colleagues presented SanTO, the Sanctified Theomorphic Operator, at the IEEE RO-MAN conference in New Delhi. The published abstract describes a Catholic humanoid robot "with the appearance of a statue of a saint and some interactive features", driven by a dialogue system integrated with vision, touch, voice and lights, and reports that the team "collected the first responses, particularly focused on the impression of sacredness of the robot, during an experiment that took place in a church in Peru". Separately, the robot has been described searching Scripture to answer questions about God and reciting the rosary alongside users, and has been tested praying with patients in a German hospice. The paper frames the work as offering insights on sacredness applied to a robot and the role of automation in religion, not as a claim that the machine believes.

SoftBank's Pepper robot was configured by Nissei Eco, a plastic moulding company that also arranges funerals, to perform at Buddhist ceremonies. IEEE Spectrum reported that Pepper "can chant sutras from four major Japanese Buddhist sects, can be set up to livestream the ceremony to anyone who can't be there in person, and appears to be able to bow when appropriate", at 50,000 yen (about $450) per funeral, materially less than the customary offering to a human priest. The economic framing is the point: the robot was offered as a cheaper substitute for a ritual performance, which is a claim about liturgy rather than about faith.

BlessU-2 was installed in Wittenberg by the Evangelical Church in Hesse and Nassau for the 500th anniversary of the Reformation. Visitors choose one of five languages (German, English, French, Spanish or Polish) and a male or female voice, and pick from 31 blessings across four categories; the robot raises its arm, lights its hands, recites a New Testament verse and prints the blessing out. The church's Stephan Krebs said the point was the question rather than the service: "We wanted people to consider if it is possible to be blessed by a machine, or if a human being is needed." He also said "The idea is to provoke debate", and framed the project as "We don't want to robotize our church work, but see if we can bring a theological perspective to a machine." The institution that built it treated the robot as a prompt for theology, not as a believer.

Longquan Temple, on the northwestern outskirts of Beijing, created Xian'er in 2015. CGTN reports that the robot "can chant mantras and answer questions on basic Buddhist tenets", and quotes Master Xiandu saying that "Xian'er can share such wisdom to those who confide it". The robot is about two feet tall, wears a yellow robe and carries a touchscreen offering answers to roughly twenty questions about Buddhism and temple life, and began life as a cartoon character devised by Master Xianfan before the temple built it with a technology team. The temple's stated aim was to reach a digitally native audience and to argue that Buddhism and science are not in conflict, which is a claim about outreach rather than about the machine's inner life.

John Searle's Chinese Room argument holds that executing a program, however convincingly, does not amount to understanding. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy states his thesis as the claim that "instantiating a program could not be constitutive of intentionality, because it would be possible for an agent to instantiate the program and still not have the right kind of intentionality". The distinction Searle draws is between derived intentionality, which an observer supplies, and intrinsic intentionality, which the system would have to hold itself. Belief is an intentional state: to believe in God is to hold a conviction about something. On Searle's account a machine running a program has only the derived kind, which is why a robot can perform a liturgy flawlessly and still not be described as believing it. This row is the contrast to the four above and is an attributed philosophical argument, not a settled finding.