Comment As a Unitarian... (Score 4, Insightful) 531
Of course that's assuming that robots are born atheists,
AIs will be "born" as whatever they're programmed to be.
Humans are born with a natural predisposition to see actions as the result of a human-like being, with a stronger prejudice toward more-similar beings. That's wholly unrelated to whether such actions actually are a God's will, but it's how we are built. Similarly, a sufficiently-advanced AI could have preprogrammed knowledge that it was built be humans, or it could be left as a blank slate to form its own conclusions about the world. If we are to play the role of God, we can decide what our master plan is for our creations.
On the other hand, suppose someone did endow a strong AI with emotion – encoded, say, as a strong preference for one type of experience over another...
Then you've created an AI with prejudice, not emotion. Emotion is a fluid thing, as the result of several competing motivations, but that's unrelated to faith.
Faith is a free choice with a conscious acknowledgement of doubt. I choose to believe in the absence of a God, knowing that there's a chance I'm incorrect. Other people choose to believe in one or more deities, knowing there's a chance they are incorrect. Certain other folks have been born into a society that does not permit any other choice but to believe what society demands, so the choice may not necessarily be a free one.
For a robot to have faith, it must first actually understand what it is considering. It must understand what is observable and what is not, and it must understand what of its belief may be observable.
Free faith is a matter of knowing everything you can, and choosing what you want to think about what is unknowable. Yes, we can create AIs that are not free, but I don't see much achievement in that.