The Dawn Treader

    "How do you know," he asked, "that  your sister's story is not true?"

    "Oh, but--", began Susan, and then stopped.  Anyone could see from the old man's face that he was perfectly serious.  Then Susan pulled herself together and said, "But Edmund said they had only been pretending."

    "That is a point," said the Professor, "which certainly deserves consideration; very careful consideration.  For instance -- if you will excuse me for asking the question -- does your experience lead you to regard your brother or your sister as the more reliable?  I mean, which is the more truthful?"

    "That is the funny thing about it, sir," said Peter.  "Up till now, I'd have said Lucy every time."

    "And what do you think, my dear?" said the Professor turning to Susan.

    "Well," said Susan, "in general, I'd say the same thing as Peter, but this couldn't be true -- all this about the wood and the faun."

    "That is more than I know," said the Professor, "and a charge of lying against someone whom you have always found truthful is a very serious thing; a very serious thing indeed."

    "We were afraid it might'n be lying," said Susan; "we thought there might be something wrong with Lucy."

    "Madness, you mean?" said the Professor quit cooly.  "Oh, you can make your minds easy about that.  One only has to look at her and talk to her to see that she is not mad."

    "But then," said Susan and stopped.  She had never dreamed that a grown-up would talk like the Professor and didn't know what to think.

    "Logic!" said the Professor half to himself.  "Why don't they teach logic at these schools?  There are only three possibilities.  Either your sister is telling lies, or she is mad, or she is telling the truth.  You know she doesn't tell lies and it is obvious she is not mad.  For the moment then, and unless any further evidence turns up, we must assume she is telling the truth."

    Susan looked at him very hard and was quite sure from the expression on his face that he was not making fun of them.

    "But how could it be true, sir?" asked Peter.

    "Why do you say that?" asked the Professor.

    "Well for one thing," said Peter, "if it was real why doesn't everyone find this country every time they go to the wardrobe?  I mean, there was nothing there when we looked; even Lucy didn't pretend there was."

    "What has that to do with it?" said the professor.

    "Well, sir, if things are real, they're there all the time."

    "Are they?" said the professor; and Peter did not know quite what to say.

    "But there was not time," said Susan. "Lucy had no time to have gone anywhere, even if there was such a place.  She came running after us the very moment we were out of the room.  It was less than a minute, and she pretended to have been away for hours."

    "That is the very thing that makes her story so likely to be true," said the Professor.  "If there really is a door in the house that leads to some other word (and I should warn you that this is a very strange house, and even I know very little about it) -- if, I say, she had got into another world, I should not be at all surprised to find that the other world had a separate time of its own; so that however long you stayed there it would never take up any of our time.  On the other hand, I don't think many girls of her age would invent that idea for themselves.  If she had been pretending, she would have hidden for a reasonable time before coming out and telling her story."

    "But do you really mean, sir, ' said Peter, "that there could be other worlds -- all over the place, just round the corner -- like that?"

   "Nothing is more probable," said the Professor, taking off his spectacles and beginning to polish them, while he muttered to himself, "I wonder what they do teach them at these schools."

The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, p. 47 - p. 50

I love this dialog between Peter, Susan and the Professor.  Do you recognize the apologetic the Professor is using with his young inquirers?  You should.  Lewis was quite famous for it.

Here is the deal neal.  Lucy has made a truth claim.  There is another world inside of the wardrobe.  It is a world that has fauns and woods and it is winter there.  And, time seems to run differently there.  Hours in that place converts to seconds in our own world.

It is a fantastically wild truth claim.  Peter and Susan are right to be skeptical.  It is as wild as claiming there is an invisible dragon in your garage.

The question is, what should you do with such a wild truth claim?  Peter and Susan do the reasonable thing.  They go to an authority.  Who could be more of an authority than a Professor?  Professors are trained in logic and worldly knowledge, after all.

Susan and Peter get a shock to their sensibilities as this Professor does the unexpected.  He does not dismiss the outrageous truth claim a priori.  He looks at the facts.  He looks at the credibility of the person who made the claim.  He considers the alternative possibilities.  He even uncovers some evidence that Peter and Susan had missed entirely.  If Lucy was lying, she made an obvious gaffe with the time thing.  Why would someone make such a ridiculous mistake as that if they were really trying to pull one over on their sister and brother?  And how could such a young girl come up with such an advanced metaphysical thought as differing time realities?

Susan and Peter have very limited plausibility structures.  The idea of a different world was not within the realm of possibility.  It was outside of their plausibility structure.

What apologists like the Professor do, is to expand the boundaries of plausibility structures through the use of reasoned argument.  Some call this process shifting a paradigm. 

Good apologists do something else which is very important.  They engage their audience.  They listen attentively, and they ask good questions.  Do you see all of the good Columbo questions that the Professor asks Susan and Peter to get them thinking?  He does not demean them by preaching to them.  It is not a monologue.  It is a conversation.  He gets them thinking by asking good questions.

Do Susan and Peter walk away from this discussion convinced that Narnia exists?  No.  But they walk away less sure that Lucy was telling a lie.  And that is the point.

That is progress.  That is the way apologetics works.