Believing in Everything

David Wells:

G. K. Chesterton once observed that when God and his truth vanish from a society, it would be natural to think that people would no longer believe in anything at all. That, however, turns out not to be the case. Now they believe in everything.  

How else do we explain the remarkable circumstance of highly sophisticated people, secularized or postmodern, who can assault any and every religious belief but who, at the same time, can indulge fantasies about aliens? Or sightings of Elvis? Or the most far-fetched conspiracy theories, like that the Bush administration actually planned and carried out the attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001? Or, on a more mundane level, how can these highly sophisticated people also think that every religious belief, no matter how unlikely, has validity as long as someone holds it sincerely? However, in this atmosphere, where everything is believed and anything is believable, at least to someone, nothing can act as a norm. All that is left is power. And, in a fallen world, we do well to be cautious when all there is, is power.

—David Wells, The Courage to Be Protestant: Truth-lovers, Marketers, and Emergents in the Postmodern World (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008), 71.