"What I'm trying to say is that holding these beliefs doesn't make you intellectually impaired, or unable to use reasoning. "

They prove their is something fundamentally wrong with your logical reasoning and evaluation of evidence.

You use God as an explanation for why the universe exists but cannot explain where God came from so you are just adding an extra unnecessary step.

Your software engineering background gives you a unique perspective to understand this: When debugging code, you follow the evidence (logs, stack traces, reproducible errors) rather than starting with assumptions about what should be happening. Evolution works the same way - we follow the evidence rather than starting with assumptions about how life should have developed.

The power of evolutionary theory isn't just that it explains what we see - it's that it makes testable predictions. For example, evolutionary theory predicted we would find transitional fossils in specific geological layers before we actually found them. It predicted specific genetic relationships between species that were later confirmed by DNA sequencing. Just as in software engineering, a theory that makes accurate predictions is more valuable than one that only explains what we already know.

You're absolutely right that being religious doesn't make someone intellectually impaired. But perhaps consider that accepting evolution doesn't require abandoning faith in God - it might instead lead to a deeper appreciation of the elegant mechanisms through which creation could have unfolded.