This came up—well, not exactly as I’ve framed it but I thought it expresses the question well—in a conversation with someone today. We were joking about earning brownie points with “the one who determines our fate” and she asked, but what if there is nothing and death is the end, how would you decide?
I am a Christian but it would not be right to answer from the standpoint of my faith and so I said that logically we should focus on the reality that there is indeed life after death rather than on the reality that it all ends in nothingness. This is because if it all ends in nothingness then how we live our lives has no impact—it all ends in nothing, not even regret. But if there is life after death as taught by many religions then how we live has real consequences.
If it is going to be a gamble either way because there is no certainty, at least not in a scientific, empirical way, it makes sense to gamble on the side that has real consequences.
In other words it is OK to be wrong if in the end there is just nothing but it is important to be right if indeed there is life after death.
This is not about those who believe that there is nothing beyond death or those who believe there is. This is about those who say, I don’t know but I still need to choose a direction because not choosing is already a choice and it is a choice to live in the reality that death ends in nothing.
When I thought about it later, the question then arose in my mind: if I choose to believe that there is a hereafter and live from that point of view, how do I decide which religious view I should adopt? After all they don’t all teach the same thing.
That is a question for another day.
ps: Just wrote this as a companion piece – Why I believe reality has to have a supreme intelligence