# Why People Don't Know What to Believe: Chris Palmer on Nihilism Dr. Chris Palmer tells Pastor Adam Mesa why information overload leaves many people unsure what to believe, and why a story can point a restless soul toward God. Source: Pray.com — https://www.pray.com/articles/why-people-dont-know-what-to-believe-chris-palmer-on-nihilism Author: Adam Mesa Category: Faith & Wisdom Published: 2026-10-22 Last revised: 2026-10-22 --- ## Key takeaways - **Too much information weakens belief.** Palmer says a flood of opinions leaves people unsure what to believe or why. - **Nihilism takes two forms.** Some people give up on meaning, and others turn angry and try to tear things down. - **Meaning needs a ground.** Palmer argues that a society that forgets God loses what holds meaning in place. - **Stories can reach the soul.** His book wraps philosophy in a narrative so readers feel the problem before they argue about it. - **Revelation needs careful reading.** It is an apocalypse, a prophecy and a letter at once, and treating it as a news forecast leads readers astray. ## From a 458-page dissertation to a book Dr. Chris Palmer, dean of the Barnett College at Southeastern University, joined Pastor Adam Mesa on Beyond the Letter. His doctoral work ran 458 pages and took six years. It examined suffering and theodicy in the Book of Revelation from a Pentecostal view. Palmer found that Pentecostals had never worked the problem out philosophically. They had practical spiritual responses instead, and he sees a deep satisfaction and hope in answering tragedy with the Holy Spirit rather than with an explanation of why. When the six years ended, he told Mesa, he needed a real break. His first book, *A World Without God*, grew from what he calls the cutting room floor of that thesis: the scraps that did not belong in it but that he wanted to use. ## Reading Revelation with care Mesa asked how someone should approach Revelation, since a young man in his church wanted to lead a small group through it. Palmer said to read it, but to expect an unfamiliar world that takes some help. In the opening of Revelation ([Revelation 1:1-4](/bible/web/revelation-1/#v1)), John gives three descriptions of the book: an apocalypse, a prophecy and a letter to seven local churches. Palmer says people often assume prophets only predicted the future. In his view that was probably the smallest part of what they did. Mostly they confronted idolatry and injustice, proclaimed God's restoration, called for repentance and gave hope to God's people. He warned that someone with wrong assumptions about prophecy and no familiarity with apocalyptic writing has a ninety-nine percent chance of mishandling the text. He urged readers to take a symbol backward, asking where it appeared in Daniel, Ezekiel or Genesis, before carrying it forward into today's headlines. His examples of the wrong way were the pope as antichrist and Apple Pay as the mark of the beast. Mesa added that each new generation reinterprets the news to fit the text, and calls that dangerous. Palmer's best example is Revelation 5, where readers hear about a conquering lion and see a slain lamb. > One of the elders said to me, “Don’t weep. Behold, the Lion who is of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has overcome: he who opens the book and its seven seals.” I saw in the middle of the throne and of the four living creatures, and in the middle of the elders, a Lamb standing, as though it had been slain, having seven horns and seven eyes, which are the seven Spirits of God, sent out into all the earth. > > ([Revelation 5:5-6](/bible/web/revelation-5/#v5), WEB) The image redefines what it means to conquer, he said, and he thinks Revelation retrains the way we look at the world. ## Why we no longer know what to believe About five years ago, Palmer noticed that memes seemed to be the only thing bringing society together. Many of the most popular ones tell the viewer he is a doormat or a piece of trash. He came to see this as a passive nihilism that medicates us, and he began asking why we are drawn to it. His diagnosis in the book is what he calls infobesity. Every voice has to be louder or hotter than the last, and as Palmer put it, "we don't really even know what to believe and if we wanted to know what to believe, we don't know why we believe it." He cited Kierkegaard's worry about the town square: when everyone speaks for the sake of speaking, nobody has to commit, and people become passive spectators. The book's second chapter traces four ages of philosophy. Humanity began in the age of the gods, when God was assumed and needed no proof. Then came the ideal forms of Plato, then Descartes, who moved the starting point of philosophy to the self. Finally Nietzsche treated every claim to truth as a bias, a way of arranging the world, which made truth subjective. Palmer does not know where this goes next. He does know that Christians have to live in it. ## Two ways to give up on meaning Mesa asked for an elevator definition. Palmer answered that "nihilism is this feeling things are meaningless." Anyone who asks what their purpose is, he said, has felt it. He sees two responses. One is to shrug, wear black and make jokes about how worthless you are, which he describes as giving up and dying. The other is to push your own values on everyone and cancel those who disagree. Both, he says, are nihilistic, and both grow out of a crisis of meaning. Palmer pointed to Nietzsche's parable of the madman who goes through a town asking where God is and tells the crowd they have killed him. Nietzsche saw that forgetting God would bring a crisis of meaning. Palmer put it this way: "I think a world without God, we are deeply nihilistic because we have lost our sense of what gives us meaning and what grounds us." ## A story that stops at God The book opens in a fictional town called Novemberton. At the university there, four characters from Dostoevsky take the stage in a lecture on human religion: Stavrogin, Raskolnikov, Ivan Karamazov and Kirillov. Each tells how he tried to build morality and meaning, and each fails. Because not every life ends in tragedy, Palmer later adds four modern figures: a celebrity influencer, a protester, a thinker and a DoorDash driver. None is a villain. He shows how people respond to meaninglessness, and the result feels like vapor. Ten of the twelve chapters are despairing on purpose, he said, so that readers feel the problem. The last chapters leave only a flicker of hope, and the book stops at God. Palmer does not lay out a theology of the cross, and some evangelicals criticized him for it. A friend compared the ending to Mark's Gospel, which simply cuts off. Palmer said that was his aim, because moving the argument to Christ would take many more pages and a reader could see it as a bait and switch. What he hopes for is a reader who says, "I need God," and who senses that "the soul gnaws for God." He also took up the claim that atheists can be good people. He believes they can. His question is where their morality comes from and what gives them a reason to be moral. Mesa added an example: a rapper in an interview answered a plea to be a sober vessel for God by saying he felt fine. Feeling fine, Mesa said, does not settle the matter. ## Why story reaches the soul Palmer chose narrative deliberately. He said, "I think philosophy, apologetics should be knit together with a story at times because it can often be abstract." He admires C. S. Lewis's argument, though he thinks Lewis's best work was his stories, which reshaped the Christian imagination. Mesa gave his own example. He showed his two young sons the Narnia film and told them only that it was a story with Jesus in it. When one brother sold out his siblings for Turkish delight, Mesa's older son, who was seven at the time, said it was not candy but sin. When Aslan gave his life and rose again, the boy said it was Jesus. Mesa had told him nothing of sin or the lion and the lamb, and the story did the teaching. Palmer told of the Gerbert and the Halo Express tapes his father gave him as a child, a story about angels visiting children afraid of a thunderstorm. He still remembers it at forty-two, and credits it with helping him get past his fear of the dark. He also recalled hearing John Lennox say that Christians need to write more novels and stories. ## What this means for you If you feel worn down by competing voices, this conversation names that weariness. Constant noise makes it hard to commit to anything, and a person can drift into either shrugging or shouting without seeing it happen. You might ask yourself a few questions. Which voices shape what you believe, and have you committed to anything beyond reacting to them? When you feel that life is flat or meaningless, where do you take that feeling? And who around you might hear the truth more easily through a story than through an argument? Palmer's starting point is simple: the soul longs for God, and that longing is worth listening to.