Rodney Brooks

Rodney Brooks, director of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT and best known for creating the robot known as "Cog", has been mentioned as an atheist in several articles written about him over the years. He was also featured in the critically-acclaimed Errol Morris documentary "Fast, Cheap, & Out Of Control".

His personal webpage can be found at [1]. One of the questions in his FAQ: "Some of your papers refer to evolution. Don't you know that evolution is a myth?"

His answer: "If you believe that then you must reject most of modern science, all of modern biology, most of medicine, and large amounts of technology that are used to produce the food you eat every day. You may as well try to tell me that the world is flat. It's an equally preposterous claim. I will not respond to you if you send me email, telephone me, or fax me about this. Life is too short."

An article at MSNBC's website about a controversy over MIT's "God & Computers" course interviewed Brooks. While he said he was an atheist in the article, he also said he supported the course.

There's an old Wired article at [2] that contains the quote:

"I've been an atheist - I had found it difficult to have religious beliefs and scientific ones," Brooks explained. "But I've accepted that I have a duality - there's a human way of interacting with people but also a mechanistic explanation of what people are and how they work."

Though the contributor (07) notes that the quote might be considered inconclusive since it sounds as if he's speaking in past tense, there have been recent articles which Brooks mentions that he is an atheist.