Every scientist has to be a materialist, it comes from interacting with the world as it is. Most of them then keep their materialism in their personal life, but unfortunately some come home from work and stop thinking critically, embracing dualism or some other unprovable fantasies. If you want people engaging with the world and having correct ideas, you need to tolerate materialism because that's how that happens. It offending your religious worldview is unrelated.
Quite obviously not true (and also untrue in a documented sense in that many great scientists have not been materialists). Science is a method, not a philosophical view of the world.
> it comes from interacting with the world as it is
That the world is materialistic is unproven (and not possible to prove).
You are simply propounding a materialist philosophy here. As I've said before, it's fine to have that philosophy. It's not fine to dogmatically push that view as 'reality' and then extend on that to build and push fantasies about 'artificial intelligence'. Again, we avoid all of this philosophical debate if we simply stick to the term 'machine learning'.
