Musings on Andy Weir

 This is going to be kind of rambling, I suspect.

Andy Weir is a now very famous author who has published three books: the Martian, Artemis, and Project Hail Mary. 

He was a software engineer and total science nerd who wrote The Martian for fun and posted it free on his personal website.  He had written many other things before that, but The Martian was the most popular.   A bunch of people loved it (which is reasonable -- it is AWESOME) and asked him to put it into Kindle format. He did, priced it at 99 cents, and threw it up on Amazon.  It was enormously successful and a publishing house came calling and published it and it was a hit.  Then a movie was made from the book, which is also really good.

So I adore The Martian except for one thing, which is there is a lot of profanity. I don't like profanity. But it is such a wonderful book that I have read it several times and just skip over the profanity.  The basic idea is that an astronaut gets stranded on a Martian base in the near future and has to figure out how to survive while people on Earth struggle to rescue him.  The protagonist is funny and witty and so even though he faces life and death situations frequently, it isn't too heavy.

Weir wrote Artemis next and I read like one or two chapters and gave up because I really didn't like the main character.

THEN came Project Hail Mary, which was released in May.  Since it was destined to be a best seller, the Kindle version sells for $14.99.  I just can't handle that. I can't.  Wow.  Too much money for a book which I might have hated. Yes, I am cheap.  So I got in the queue to borrow it from the library and weeks later, I got it.  I read it this week. AND I LOVE IT.  It is so much fun, as much fun as the Martian but with way less profanity. The main character is a junior high science teacher turned astronaut who has to save the world, and Weir decided to make the guy less profane.  Which I appreciate a lot.

Anyhoo, I don't want to spoil the plot but will say that alien life forms are a big part of it.  The Martian is science fiction as is Project Hail Mary, but the latter is more "out there". We have sent probes to Mars, after all and know a lot about Mars; we have never sent a probe to a planet orbiting another star, so Weir had to be more inventive.  It is great fun and he worked on the science a lot.  Main character is very appealing.

One thing that pops up over and over is the concept of evolution. Of course. Because most scientists and science nerds believe in macro evolution.  By that, I mean that they believe life started somehow and evolved through millions and billions of years to get where we are now with people and many other animals and insects and reptiles and fish and hundreds of thousands of different kinds of plants.

I do not believe in macroevolution.  Now, smarter people than me do believe in macroevolution, and smarter people than me don't believe in it. I think it is not so much an intelligence issue as a world view issue.

I understand people believing in evolution. Most have been taught it is true in school, after all. But it does annoy me (a lot!) is that many scientists start with the following belief.

1.  There is no God, and therefore everything we see must be caused by natural processes.

No, just no.  Just no no no no no!  You don't START with an assumption that has not been investigated scientifically! In my view, there is every reason under the sun to believe in a Creator God because our world is too complex, our animals are too complex, our plants are too complex, WE are too complex to come about by chance! And the physical constants are insane in our universe! They are balanced so perfectly to permit life.  Every time I have a twinge of doubt about my Christian faith, I think about the universe and Earth and people, animals, and vegetation.  Because wow, we are truly amazing.

Case for a Creator by Lee Strobel is an awesome book that talks about all the ways that science points towards a Creator God.  

So it is a great book, Project Hail Mary, and also absurd in its own way, but that's fine.  It is tremendous fun.