I was talking with a group of friends trying to come up with possible answers to unanswerable questions like:

• What happens when we die?
• How does the way we live affect things after our death?

We can never know the answers to these questions with certainty. They are fundamentally unknowable. So what is the point of spending so much energy on something you’ll never be able to fully answer?

A friend provided a profound response. While we can’t be certain of any particular theory, the conclusions we make will change the way we our lives right now. For example, if you believe our choices today affect the next life, you’ll behave differently than if you didn’t.

It seems as if we first need to decide what kind of person we want to become; how we hope to live. Then as we evaluate possible answers to these unknowable questions, we judge them by how much they enable us to become that person.

This thought is backwards when compared to the primary pursuit of truth common in religious circles. But it might be more true than we realize.

Let’s make this personal. Today, I want to become a more generous, confident, humble, strong, meek, realistic, hopeful, creative, life-enhancing human.

If a tenant of my worldview doesn’t help me get closer to those goals, why keep believing it? Because it’s true? If it’s one of these unanswerable questions, how can we ever know with certainty?