FATHERS ARE MORE THAN JUST DNA

There is more than matter that matters in this existence. And that assumption includes fathers....

This is not only the starting point for many theologians, but even for many Big Bang theorists. Because they cannot explain how and why the Bang occurred, some reluctantly yield to the possibility of some pre-design. They're not creationists -- that might jeopardise their cosmological credentials -- but they do grant there may have been some design preceding the Bang. Not necessarily a biblical God, but something.

Among these reluctants stands the 21st C's leading atheist, Richard Dawkins of Oxford and best-selling-author fame. Like your own Christopher Hitchens, Stephen Hawking and Dawkins postulate we each exist in a vast cosmic maelstrom as temporary custodians of this cellular mass we call a body. A mass whose matter will continue swirling on in this maelstrom long after our deaths.

However, nowhere have these luminaries had anything to say about the matter-less matter of fatherhood. Rushing to fill that embarrassing scientific void, some of us have simply concluded: A father is, at heart, a man who expects his children to be as good as he meant to be.

If true, here may be the best example of why matter is not all that matters. For while the materialist logic of evolution can explain a father's genetic passage into his children, evolution is silent about the matter-less design behind those paternal expectations. In other words, why really should he care?

But we do, each in our own way, and this caring surely has more to do than with our genetic disposition to survive. Ask any evolutionist to explain why a father rushes late at night to an ER or a police station where his child has been injured or arrested. To reduce his fierce concern to the mere matter of cellular matter would not only insult my own good Father, but all the good fathers that came before him.

So a salute to fathers and fatherhood this month. Not to their genes, but the genuineness of their love...