For the generality of men God is the provider of immortality. Talking to a peasant one day, I proposed to him the hypothesis that there might indeed be a God who governs heaven and earth, a Consciousness of the Universe, but that for all that the soul of every man may not be immortal in the traditional and concrete sense. He replied:
Then wherefore God?
Miguel de Unamuno – The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and in Peoples