Theodor Haecker, Journal in the Night (tr. Alexander Dru, Pantheon Books, 1950, p. 67, #263, written 1940):
The man who explicitly does not believe and does not will to believe (for the will to believe belongs to believing) in an eternal life, that is to say in a personal life after death, will become an animal, an animal being which among other things, man is. Man is 'planned as spirit,' as Kierkegaard puts it, but that includes the immortality of the soul. Whoever relinquishes that also gives up the spirit of man.
Man alone among the animals raises the question whether he is more than an animal. His raising of this question does not prove that he is more than an animal; perhaps it proves only that he is the most pretentious of all animals, a crazy animal, an evolutionary fluke who merely fancies himself more than an animal. Such a fanciful conceit might even be accorded survival value within a naturalist scheme. Thinking himself the crown of creation, a child of God, with divine sanction to lord it over, but also cherish and protect the critters beneath him, this lofty self-conception, even if false, might enhance his chances of survival. It could be like that, or at least I cannot see a way definitively to exclude this epistemic possibility.
Or it could be like this: Man's having a world (Welt) and not merely an environment (Umwelt) like the animals points to a higher origin, a spiritual origin, and a higher destiny. Elsewhere I catalog twelve meanings of 'world'; here I am using the term in my twelfth sense, the transcendental-phenomenological sense. It remains an open question whether the world in this sense has an ontic anchor in God, whether the light of the transcendental-phenomenological Lichtung (clearing) has an onto-theological Source. We cannot know it to be the case, but we can reasonably believe it to be the case. That is as good as it gets here below. And so I am brought around, once again, to the fact that, in the end, one must decide what to believe and how to live.
Haecker is right to point out that "the will to believe belongs to believing." Not all belief is voluntary, but religious and anti-religious belief is. The will comes into it, as it does not in the case of some such mundane belief as that the Sun has risen. You are free to believe that you are a complex physical system slated for utter annihilation in a few years, months, days, minutes, and you are free to believe that you are "planned as spirit." Either way reasons can be adduced, reasons that are not obviously bad reasons.
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