Well put. The underlying debate is not do what extent machines are able to think like humans, but to what extent humans are merely organic machines. Or as you alluded to, more simply it is monism versus dualism. And dualism is just the generalization of the God of the gaps fallacy.
Monism is doing a awful lot of work in this hand wave. You'd only have to sit in on a college-level Philosophy of Mind course for a single semester to understand how silly your comment is.
The fact of the matter is there is no academic consensus on whether Searle's Chinese Room argument is wrong. But the number of arguments against it is always growing while Searle's responses to these arguments are getting less frequent.