Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look, and an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth.

For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street.

Years ago, I had an interesting conversation on a Break Point This Week podcast with Paul Rayburn.

Paul was the author of a book that I found fascinating, Do Fathers Matter?

One of the reasons I found the book so fascinating is that Paul

Rayburn was a science writer. He spent a lot of time articulating and trying to clarify some

high-level scientific findings. He wrote about things like red shift theory and biological

evolution and things like that. And Paul Rayburn was an atheist, or at least an agnostic,

a secular humanist. He didn't believe in God or religion or anything like that. So I found it

fascinating that he tackled this issue of fathers. And I asked him why. And the first thing he said was

that the research on fathers is relatively new in the social sciences. In other words,

it was largely assumed for decades that fathers didn't really make much of an impact or

contribution to the lives and well-being of children other than, of course, genetic material

and maybe financial support. So all the research was focused on do moms matter and in all the ways that moms matter.

And at the time, I responded to him and said, really, we spent all that time and money asking, do moms matter?

I mean, seriously, what was the result of those studies?

Duh. Of course they matter.

But over the last 30 years, Rayburn clarified, there was a lot of research that was aimed at the role that father's

play in the long-term well-being of children. And then I asked him, but wait a minute, why did you

choose to write this book? And he said, what do you mean? I said, well, much of your work has been in

the hard sciences, chemistry, biology, physics, things like that, not in the so-called softer

sciences like sociology and psychology.

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