“There is an interplay between perception, facts, and the web of convictions in which everyone makes sense of things. My perception of the world changed when, by the Spirit of God, I was changed. I understood things I had not heretofore understood or began to understand them in a way I had not. In a sense, then, I was given new evidence, new facts (reality) to consider and a new perception of things simultaneously.”

I’m not sure why, as a child, the TV show Dragnet captured my attention and imagination. Perhaps it was the theme song with its beat and blaring horns or perhaps it was the staccato, film-noir dialogue or the claim that the episodes were based on actual cases from the files of the Los Angeles police department. On television, even in black and white, the streets of Los Angeles seemed clean, sunny (unlike my town, there was never any snow in the streets of Dragnet), open (strangely devoid of cars), and adorned with art deco. The show first began on radio in the 1940s and moved to television in the early 50s. Jack Webb played the lead detective, Sgt. Joe Friday. His partners changed over the years but Harry Morgan as Detective Bill Gannon was the most memorable. Sgt. Friday’s most famous line was often spoken to a rattled or ratting witness: “Just the facts.” In the search for the perpetrators, officers Friday and Gannon needed the facts in order to discover who and done what to whom, to catch the criminal, and to deliver him to justice.

Contrary to rumors that began in France in the 1960s, which began to circulate widely in North America in the 1980s, facts still matter but, as D. C. McAllister argues in an essay in the Federalist today, there is more to discovering truth than accumulating what is sometimes called “raw data.” Of course there is no such thing really as “raw data” or uninterpreted, “brute facts.” Michael Polanyi (1889–1976)) showed that, in every science experiment, sometime must select the data to be studied and someone must do the studying from some framework. There is an unavoidably personal, subjective element in all-knowing. Readers and students of Cornelius Van Til (1895–1987) have long known that there are and can be no “brute” facts because God has already interpreted everything. He has assigned a significance to everything. As creatures made in his image our responsibility is to interpret reality according to God’s self-disclosure (revelation), to think analogically, to think God’s thoughts after him, as it were.

This does not mean that there are no facts whatever but it does mean that we must be honest in acknowledging and accounting for the subjective element in the accumulation and interpretation of facts and evidence. For example, when beginning an investigation, a historian cannot decide ahead of time (a priori) how a story must out. He must do his best to assemble and assess the facts honestly and fairly. He should be committed to telling the truth—which, of course, assumes that there is truth to be told—as best he can. To say that there is no truth is not a statement of fact. It’s a theological claim and it is a theological claim to say that there is truth. These are unavoidably fundamental, first order, religious claims about the nature of things. These claims arise from a web of convictions, a worldview (a theology really), with which and in which we all work and through which we determine the ultimate significance of any fact. That web of convictions, however, is not incorrigible. It does change as mine did. Once I interpreted things through the lens or in the web of convictions about ultimate things that said nothing had any particular significance because the world is essentially random and chaotic. Sometimes I considered that there was probably a god of some sort that was generally overseeing things but not such that he (or it) was actively involved in the world and certainly not in a way that would mean that I was not autonomous relative to all other wills (even God’s). I was an Enlightened, modern person. I assumed that I was the measure of all things and that the world was what I said it was.

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