Your logic doesn't stand up here. Why should you trust dostoyevsky's subjective understanding of god anymore than your own? Besides, dostoyevsky's best asset was his imagination, not his capacity for logic.
I read Scott Aaronson's article on religious rules of interference the other day, and I guess he nailed it: http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=232
What he says is that for religious people, rules of logic and interference only have to applied a limited number of times. So they never arrive at the contradictions their logic really has.
He also says that this mode of thinking is actually default for most people and also works in most cases. So I suppose you can still be an engineer, as long as you are lucky enough to have only projects that are solvable with the "just compute a limited number of steps" rule.
> but it's only now that we see blogs pop up on faith
I'm not sure what "now" you're referring to, but blogs on faith have existed for a very long time now. By relativistic Internet measure, anyways.
I was talking to a friend the other day that said the Devil had internet from the start; but it's only now that we see blogs pop up on faith. So thank you Paul for this.
Also, being the top post on HN is just the push I needed to write on my faith. Was initially afraid that it'd turn my readership away. So thank you once again for teaching me to not hold back.
As an Engineer, I'm finding that faith and logic can go hand-in-hand after all. The more I question my faith, the stronger it gets.
I'm also reminded of Dostoevsky's search. Who am I to argue with a Great Thinker who spent years arguing against God's existence only to admit he was wrong in the end.