From Robots to God

Robots fascinate me -- from the lowly, like the Roomba vacuum that whirs around your house sucking dirt off the carpet and knows not to fall down stairs or ram incessantly against the leg of the table in the middle of your room, to the humanoid ones that you see in science fiction movies like Artificial Intelligence or the organic, animal-looking ones in The Matrix. I think a lot about them, about what exactly they are, things or persons; I imagine conversations with them; I try to figure out how standing face to face with a self-aware machine will change my idea of who I am.

Friday nights I watch a SciFi channel show called Battlestar Galactica. In it humans are at war with machines, called cylons, whom they have created and who have rebelled against them. These cylons have learned to simulate the human body, down to its flesh and blood, so that some of them appear no different from humans. But the most interesting thing about them is that they believe in God. In gods, rather; the mythology of Battlestar Galactica is very close to the Greek. The cylons believe it is their divine mission to destroy humans because humans are such flawed creatures; humans kill each other out of greed and envy and are driven so powerfully by their instincts and most primitive desires.

The cylons’ religiosity puzzles me. They are supposed to be more rational than humans. So how can they be so compelled by the idea of God, how can they believe that they are God’s children? Why do they even need to believe that? I always thought that for a purely rational mind belief in God is unnecessary. A purely rational mind understands, and is at peace with, its place in the physical universe.

I’ve gone very abruptly a few years ago from being extremely religious to being a very confused but very determined agnostic. All I know for sure is that I don’t know. I work very hard to accept that my life has no greater meaning than the one I give it by my actions in my physical life, by what my body and my mind can do together. I wonder if this can ever cease to be hard work, if it will ever come naturally to me. It seems not. It seems that self-aware minds will always yearn, even despite themselves, after the divine.