The short story Reason was first published in 1941.

An advanced robot, QT-1, in charge of coordinating microwave energy beams to planets starts a religion with the lesser robots as its followers. The creed of the religion is that ‘there is no master but Master, and QT-1 is His prophet’.

Though the readers know the basic assumption of the robot is flawed, the logic and arguments of the robot make Zakir Naik look amateur.

The robot believes that the Master created humans and robots and when human investigators from Earth tell it that it were in fact the humans who created them, QT-1 dismisses it as a “complicated implausible hypothesis”. At one point it explains humans away as “servants of Master” now replaced by the superior itself.

Soon, the human investigators realise that the prophetic cult religion of QT-1 has arisen well within the laws of robotics to make the robots serve the best in that specific circumstances — as managers of the beam stations.

In hindsight, this short story can be considered as a powerful premonition of present-day neurological and evolutionary studies of religion — particularly prophet-based religions.

Asimov has also used religion in other earlier and major works.

In one of his earliest short stories, Trends (1939), Asimov took the clash between religious fanaticism and scientific advancement in the West in a typical binary.

The inspiration for this story came from him typing the papers for sociologist Bernhard Stern. Stern had pointed out throughout his works how every medical advancement today is commonplace, from dissection to vaccination, had to fight against social resistance, particularly from religion.

Asimov applied it to a post-War society, where religion held the sway over public life, impacting and restricting the advancements in space research.

As rocket Prometheus was getting ready to be launched for lunar mission, Otis Eldredge an evangelical mass leader ‘with a golden tongue and a sulphurous vocabulary’ starts a vitriolic campaign against it through his powerful organisation.

Religious zealotry, bubbling in the cauldron of frenzied public opinion, enables the legislative body to stop research for atoms and space, making space travel a capital crime.

Finally, the hero, John Harman, sways the public opinion after his successful space voyage, declaring in typical Galileo fashion, but more defiantly, “Go ahead, hang me, fools. But I’ve reached the Moon, and you can’t hang that.” The whole narration done from the vantage point of 2008 celebrates triumph of ‘good’ science over ‘bad’ religion.

The next important work of Asimov that brought forth the role of religion in society is Nightfall.

John Campbell who presided over the golden age of the US sci-fi asked a very young Asimov to fashion a sci-fi story out of a quote from a famous essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson on nature: