My friend Michael Cleverly was kind enough to send me God’s Mechanics, by Brother Guy Consolmagno, S.J. Consolmagno is a Jesuit brother (not a priest); he’s also an astronomer, working at the Vatican Observatory. He describes himself as a “techie”; and he has lots of friends from MIT, the University of Arizona, and a wide variety of other places who are also techies—engineers, scientists, and the like. A fair number of them find his religious faith puzzling, and of those some are genuinely curious how a fellow techie can be religious. How does it work? What’s it all about? Why does he believe it, and what does he get out of it?

Brother Guy wrote this book to answer these questions, writing as a techie for other techies. As he’d be the first to admit (I know this, because he does so), he had to write it as a techie, rather than a theologian; as a theologian, he’s a good astronomer. More than that, he’s not writing to convince; he’s writing to explain.

The thing that surprised me most is how little I match the “techie” pattern that he describes. I mean, I’ve been doing software engineering for two decades, and I’m active in the Tcl/Tk community; surely this qualifies me? But my background is in mathematics and modeling, not in engineering or the hard sciences, and that’s the community he’s really addressing. Maybe it’s just that mathematicians are more used to dealing with eternal verities than engineers and scientists are, I dunno. More than that, though, Brother Guy was writing techies who aren’t religious, a group that I’ve never been in.

My only real complaint about the book is that I think Brother Guy is unduly harsh on Aristotle’s Physics. Newton’s physics are far more useful, but Aristotle wasn’t really addressing the same problem as Newton. But I digress.

If you’re a techie, and you don’t understand how I can possibly be religious, perhaps Brother Guy’s book will help you understand. How well, I’m afraid I really can’t say.