It’s more than a mating call, more than territorial defense. There’s music of a sort, and creativity and learning and order and aesthetics. In short, we can know some things about bird song, but we probably will never know why. Or at least the scientists won’t because they refuse to accept God as an answer. As Rothenberg states: “Not everyone is convinced that Darwin’s cascade of randomness and emergent order makes any more sense than the traditional view, where biological diversity is evidence of a supreme being offering us the gift of a beautiful nature as proof of His existence — reason has never had much to do with faith. I’m not going to argue for or against anyone who says beautiful birds and beautiful songs are proof of God’s works. But if you want to trust the evidence, let God exist through evolution.”

There you have it. Right after admitting that evolution is a “cascade of randomness,” he says faith has nothing to do with reason. Amazing how blind some people can be. And he wasn’t that good a writer either. I often had a hard time following, partly because he was trying to be poetic, partly because he spoke in musical terms I didn’t understand and partly because it was just flat out boring. But there were interesting parts. Like the Starling that was raised around people but not taught specific phrases (as an experiment to see what it would pick up). When it had an infected foot looked at, it repeatedly squawked, “I have a question.”