C.S. Lewis on Worldview, Questions, and Evidence

“It is not impossible that our own Model [worldview] will die a violent death, ruthlessly smashed by an unprovoked assault of new facts—unprovoked as the nova of 1572. But I think it is more likely to change when, and because, far-reaching changes in the mental temper of our descendants demand that it should. The new Model will not be set up without evidence, but the evidence will turn up when the inner need for it becomes sufficiently great. It will be true evidence. But nature gives most of her evidence in answer to the questions we ask her. Here, as in the courts, the character of the evidence depends on the shape of the examination, and a good cross-examiner can do wonders. He will not indeed elicit falsehoods from an honest witness. But, in relation to the total truth in the witness’s mind, the structure of the examination is like a stencil. It determines how much of that total truth will appear and what pattern it will suggest.”
-C.S. Lewis, The Discarded Image, pp.222-223

Presuppositions beg certain questions, and sometimes the questions, once they’ve been pursued, turn up new evidence, true evidence. Once the evidence is turned up, you may criticize the presuppositions, you may even reframe the questions, but the evidence is revealed and will not simply go away. Evangelical engagement with biblical criticism has always attacked the often naturalistic presuppositions of the critics. And it may be true that the questions the critics have asked were raised on account of “far-reaching changes in the mental temper” of their and our generations, on account of shifts in presuppositions and assumptions. The presuppositions and assumptions may even turn out to be false. But the true evidence turned up in the pursuit of questions raised by those presuppositions becomes part of the common stock of human knowledge and must now be dealt with by anyone claiming intellectual integrity, whether they share the presuppositions that first led to the unearthing of the evidence or not.
It is not unlike the cross examiner in a movie who asks a question not strictly admissible in court. The flustered witness answers revealing a surprising detail on which the whole case turns. The judge may ask the jury to strike that testimony from their minds, but could the honest juror really forget the powerful evidence once it has been revealed simply because the cross-examiner proceeded improperly?

Attacking the critics’ presuppositions does not put the papyri back into the sand. Whether we like it or not the Oyrhynchus papyri, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Ebla Tablets and the like exist. It is not as though critical scholarship deduced them into being out of rationalistic assumptions. What’s more, these evidences come more and more into the public eye. Undergraduates study them in their religious studies classes. TV watchers hear about them on the History Channel, National Geographic and Peter Jennings documentaries. Casual readers can pick them up in $12 paperbacks in Barnes & Noble’s. The manifold connections and resemblances between such literature, artifacts and discoveries and the Scriptures are increasingly well documented and well publicized. To simply ignore them as though they had never come to light is to engage in a sort of perverse nostalgia that not only longs for “the good ol’ days” (whatever period one might see as “the good ol’ days”) but also pretends as though they were still here. It is to callously hurry past people languishing in darkness and doubt in the present in order to selfishly retreat into the imagined security of a private fantasy world that is all too often a tendentious caricature of the past one seeks to recapitulate.
Beloved, let us not continue rehearsing the same tired mantra of pointing out that much of critical scholarship has been conducted on the basis of false, naturalistic presuppositions as though that relieved us of the responsibility to engage with the facts. False presuppositions or not, critical scholarship, philological research and modern archaeology have turned up true evidence that intellectually responsible evangelical and Reformed Christians must consistently and honestly grapple with. In grappling with the evidence, our image of God may get shattered. But if all truth is God’s truth, it may be God Himself who shatters it. “He is the great iconoclast.”