Some people approach life as if it were an Agatha Christie novel. They want to solve the mystery, explain everything the way Hercule Poirot does in the great “reveal” that happens at the end of each story.

I once had a professor who could explain life’s profoundest mysteries in three to five points. He wrapped everything up neatly, even God. He was a respectable, intelligent man, but even when I was young, I realized that his explanations were an oversimplification.

Recently, Stanford University neurology and biology professor Robert Sapolsky declared that human beings do not have free will and therefore “holding people morally responsible for their actions is wrong.” It seems to me that if people don’t have free will, those who hold others morally responsible are themselves not responsible. So, to say they are “wrong” is simply meaningless.

Of course, Dr. Sapolsky was trying to clear up one of life’s great mysteries: the universal human perception of free will. I suspect some of his colleagues in Stanford’s renowned philosophy department will strongly disagree with him. But either way, they are all engaged in trying to solve a mystery.

The desire to demystify life is understandable. What we do not understand we cannot control, and what we cannot control we fear. The longing to solve mysteries comes from our very human need to manage our environment.

Some people, my professor was one, cannot rest until they have explanations. The unknown haunts them like Hamlet’s ghost. If they could, they would suck the mystery out of everything.

They won’t succeed, for we are not only surrounded by mystery; we are a mystery. “Man,” said Charles Colton, “is an embodied paradox.” Our biological makeup is blueprinted in the 3.2 billion nucleotide pairs that comprise our DNA. Each nucleobase can pair in one of four ways. What that means is the number of possible combinations in any one person is greater than the number of atoms in the universe. Why did the billions of nucleotide pairs combine in the particular way that produced you? It is a mystery.

No wonder humans are inveterate explorers of mystery. We are animalis interrogatio, the questioning animal, the only one that asks, “Why?” Finding answers is one of our chief joys. We cannot not seek, for seeking is in our nature.

That is how God designed us. St. Paul told the philosophers of Athens that God set things up as he did so that people “would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him.” We seek God, the ultimate truth, as a cell phone scans for wireless networks and for the same reason: we were designed to do so.

Like Poirot and his predecessor Sherlock Holmes, we cannot be happy if we do not have a mystery to solve. That means our potential for happiness is unlimited, for we shall never run out of mysteries. But we must learn to embrace mystery, not fear it.

Mystery is not a threat but a promise. It promises to be our teacher and offers us knowledge we could not otherwise attain. Satisfaction does not come from the annihilation of mysteries, but from the fruitful exploration of them.

As a young pastor, I squirmed when I came to biblical passages I did not understand. Wasn’t it my job to clear away all mysteries? How can one God exist as three persons? In what sense did Jesus descend into hell, as the creed declares? How can a loving God allow people to suffer? I found these and dozens of other questions threatening.

I have since learned that difficult questions like these are invitations to fresh knowledge about God. I no longer fear them. I follow them as guides.

What helped me most was the realization that I did not need answers as much as I needed the Answerer. Answers, even true ones, do not satisfy. The answerer does.

All my answers have not dispelled the mystery but have taken me deeper into it. It is in those depths that encounters with God can take place. Even there, we do not uncover the secrets of his mind, but we do discover the kindness of his heart.