Even if you believe there are souls created by God, you also believe that you can reliably cause (provoke? induce?) God to create a soul and attach it to a specific bit of matter, by merely engaging in a certain pleasurable activity.
Supposing that we could create an artificial life form with the same brain structures as a human, God could certainly create and attach a soul if he chose. Given his general willingness to create souls in response to our actions, is there a strong reason to believe he wouldn't imbue a machine capable of human-like thought with a soul?
And, how would we know whether this had happened or not? If we can't create a test capable of distinguishing a group of atoms with a soul from a group of atoms without a soul, isn't it safer to treat them both the same?
I'd say we have no way of telling. "God" or a game engine or whatever is creating those "souls" might be someone looking on with bemusement and enjoying adding souls to anything we want to see what we come up with, or might be someone who takes great offense we're meddling in their business, or might be a dumb rules engine that insists on a specific biological interaction to happen just so before it instantiates another object. Or there might be some weird quantum mechanical interaction we don't understand that gets triggered that happens to interact with another dimension. Or a bored teenager needs to go out and get another USB dongle to upgrade the number of "soul simulators" their game allows. Or an endless number of other possibilities.
> And, how would we know whether this had happened or not? If we can't create a test capable of distinguishing a group of atoms with a soul from a group of atoms without a soul, isn't it safer to treat them both the same?
Currently we don't. I don't even know if you're conscious. We don't understand intelligence well enough to reliably test for intelligence, and we don't understand well enough how intelligence relates to consciousness or whether there is a meaningful distinction.
I have a hard time believing that, for example, external simulation would have a “feature” that causes people to remember childhood memories when a tumor grows in a certain part of the brain. A much likely explanation IMHO that memories are really stored directly in the brain.
But that we seem to evidence that most of brain function reside in the brain does not mean we can conclusively say that there's no extra element to it that we don't understand.
Note that I am much more comfortable with the idea that it's all basic hardware; the big point here is not that a "soul" or external simulation or whatever is the most likely explanation, but to illustrate just how thoroughly we really have no idea what causes consciousness, or even whether consciousness really is meaningfully a thing. It's a big gaping whole in our understanding of the world that we're just being in the very infancy of trying to attack.
It's tempting to call that bullshit, but we don't know what consciousness is, and it's proving very elusive to find a physical way to explain it. And, hey, maybe we're all in a simulation and our minds are simulated outside the main simulation and so the only "conscious" entities are those with an external simulation feeding data into our universe. I'd tend to to think that rather than "ancestor simulations" like in the simulation argument, it's more likely we're in some game in that case.
Even a purely physical explanation does not preclude some physical process we're unaware of that involves some interaction with something physical that is in effect a black box from our point of view, and something we may not be able to replicate from "inside" the observable universe. E.g. imagine we're constrained to however many dimensions, but consciousness involves a process partially outside "our" dimensions.
Ultimately I'd like to think we find a purely physical/mechanistic model of consciousness that allows us to replicate it in software; the slightly less optimistic view is that we'll need some specialized hardware. The pessimistic view is that there's something involved that means it takes something very similar to a squishy biological brain to tap into whatever gives rise to consciousness. But we could also hit a wall.