What Do the Geese in My Yard Have to Do With Your Existence?

We live in a wonderful wooded area outside of town. When building our home, while the excavator was there, I had them dig a pond in the back yard and use the fill for creating grade up to the home.
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The pond has proved to be a wonderful lure for wildlife. For the past few springs it has served as a nest for a pair of mated Canada geese. 

This spring I paid special attention and was struck with the wonderment. The female made her nest on a little island in the middle of the pond, laid her four eggs, and then diligently roosted on them for a month while the male stayed nearby as protector. Even our cats did not dare intrude on these "sitting ducks" (geese) or the adorable fuzzy little goslings that emerged and wandered our yard eating grass. 

Watching this I could not help but wonder where this incredible behavior came from. How did this couple know to make a nest and guard it? Why would she be so self-sacrificing and sit on it for a month? Why did he stay nearby? How did she know what to do with the brood once it hatched? Why were they so protective? 

They went to no school to learn these things nor the benefits to their species of procreation. Nor did they learn why any of it should even matter to their personal survival. Somehow they just knew what to do, and to do it with considerable risk to their own lives. 

The common educated explanation is that this behavior, and all of the physiological and anatomical mechanisms to enact it, "evolved." 

Now we're not talking about anything simple here. What these geese do involves their whole being. Trillions of organ, tissue, cellular, and biochemical processes are involved. All of them have to be perfectly intermeshed in time for things to work. 

But evolution is a piecemeal process, a slow and incremental development over vast stretches of time. There has to be a time when the goose progenitor did not have any of these behaviors. Then, mutation after mutation had to accrue and be selected for in order to lead up to the behaviors I watch in my back yard. 

Since anything less than the full and functioning behavior would be to no avail, just excess, and, most likely, detrimental baggage, one would have to explain how these less than perfected steps would be retained in anticipation of the full and functioning whole. 

No such step-by-step detailed explanation has ever been put forth, much less any evidence that such incremental mutation-selection (neo-Darwinism) ever did or could occur. 

Of course none of this is to mention the inability to explain why all the other factors contributing to the goose behavior exist concomitantly: the universe, the laws of the universe, the Earth's motion through space (two million miles per hour), climate, atmosphere, the ecosphere, biosphere...everything in existence that makes the goose existence possible. 

I enumerate these conundrums and insoluble puzzles at length in my book. But today's intelligentsia solve it all with a word, "evolution." This glib solution frustrates me to no end. 

For those of us not so learned and faced with the very real and insurmountable obstacles to a naturalistic/materialistic explanation, we either give up or use our reasoning faculties. 

Nowhere in human experience, nowhere within the realm of actual evidence do complex functioning things come into being automatically, regardless of the time allotted. If those things show purpose, self awareness and independence, that only further marks them as something other than of spontaneous origin. 

The only reasonable explanation for the geese, if evidence and experience matter, is that they were designed and built as whole and complete creatures. I know that sounds way too simplistic. But simple is where the truth normally lies. 

But all is not solved even with this explanation. We of course want to know who or what that designer and creator is. To that we can only speculate since the infinite complexity of our world, something we can only begin to comprehend, must be exceeded by the infinite complexity of that which is responsible for its existence. 

Yes, we are left with many questions, none of which are answered by finite men and their religions. But at least we can advance beyond the naivete represented by the cocksureness of the learned of our age. 

To venture further in explanation requires more than this short article could contain. Refer to the Big Questions book for more insight.