Is The Soul Immortal?

Platonic Greek philosophy takes the position that the soul is inherently immortal. And this is the position that most Christians take today. But is this Biblically defensible? Could it even be metaphysically, philosophically, scientifically, or logically defensible?

Genesis 2:7 says,

“Then the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being.”

When God created man in the Garden of Eden, He created him from the dust of the earth. Scientifically speaking, this would be out of the atoms and elements of the earth. That is the composition of the body. However, a body is not alive by itself in this state. It needs a soul to have consciousness. This soul is God’s “breath of life” breathed into man. The breath of life is the essence of living. But when one dies, the heart and mind stop their electrical activity and one becomes clinically dead. A defibrillator can be used to bring one back into a state of living through an electrical pulse. Many have told stories of their own near death experiences where they were clinically dead and then brought back to life and while they were dead, they were still conscious and were outside of their body looking down upon it. Now, I do not take the highest stake in near death experiences to ascertain the truth of reality from but I thought it was worth mentioning to provoke further thought. Regardless, I do believe consciousness continues even after the death of the body.

In Genesis 3:19 we see the curse of man after sin,

By the sweat of your face you will eat bread, till you return to the ground, because from it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return.

The implication seems clear that the penalty of sin is death, even as God had said that the day they ate from the tree, they would surely die (Gen. 2:17). God announced this curse upon man as the consequence of their sin which would also seem to imply that had they not sinned, there would not be this curse called death. It therefore seems logically congruent to say that had they not sinned, they would have lived forever. This is further supported by the following verses in 22-24 where Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden of Eden, never to return, with all access blocked off by a cherubim guarding the entrance with a flaming sword. The reason why? So that they would not eat from the tree of life and live forever. That is, in their current body/soul condition, God did not want them to live forever with the corruption of their sinful state. Once they sinned, their biological clock started ticking and their days were numbered until they would eventually die physically. And spiritually, their life was in God’s hands to decide their future.

Man’s immortality, therefore, seems to have been conditioned on two things. First, that they do not sin. Second, that they stay in the garden to continually eat from the tree of life. But since they failed the first and were banished from the second, they no longer had immortality. The type of immortality they had is now self-evident. It was not inherent immortality but prescribed immortality given to them by the grace of God and received through the nourishment of the tree of life.

Later on, we see Jesus saying things like “whoever drinks of the water that I will give him shall never thirst; but the water that I will give him will become a well of water springing up to eternal life” (Jn. 4:14).

And John 6:47-58

Truly, truly, I say to you, he who believes has eternal life. 48 I am the bread of life. 49 Your fathers ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. 50 This is the bread which comes down out of heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die. 51 I am the living bread that came down out of heaven; if anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever; and the bread also which I will give for the life of the world is My flesh.”

52 Then the Jews began to argue with one another, saying, “How can this man give us His flesh to eat?” 53 So Jesus said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in yourselves. 54 He who eats My flesh and drinks My blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day. 55 For My flesh is true food, and My blood is true drink. 56 He who eats My flesh and drinks My blood abides in Me, and I in him. 57 As the living Father sent Me, and I live because of the Father, so he who eats Me, he also will live because of Me. 58 This is the bread which came down out of heaven; not as the fathers ate and died; he who eats this bread will live forever.”

It is from our mystical union with Jesus that as we believe and abide in Him, we will live forever. Even though we shall die, we will live (Jn. 11:25). That is, there is life beyond the grave promised to those who believe in Him, “so that whoever believes in Him have eternal life” (Jn. 3:15). Jesus is now our tree of life. There is no life apart from Him because He is life. Apart from life is death and nothingness. Apart from light is darkness. Apart from love is emptiness. This is why in the afterlife the punishment is described as darkness (Mt. 25:30; 2 Pet. 2:17; Jude 1:13) and sinners “will pay the penalty of eternal destruction, away from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of His power” (2 Thess. 1:9). The penalty is eternal, that is, a complete destruction. Why? Because nothing can live apart from the presence of the Lord who is life.

1 Timothy 6:13 says that God gives life to all things. Acts 17 says that “in Him we live and move and exist” and that “He Himself gives to all people life and breath and all things” (v. 25, 28). Hebrews 1:3 says that He upholds all things by the word of His power. God alone is the eternal self-existent, self-sustaining One. He alone possesses inherent immortality (1 Tim. 6:16). Our life is dependent on His sustaining. We do not have the divine power within ourselves to self-exist. Everything that has life and energy has it because God gave it and constantly sustains it by His power.

The soul is not naturally immortal because in order for it to be immortal, God would have to sustain its life and energy. Would God actively sustain such life and energy in eternal conscious torment? Are not those cast into Hell also cast away from the presence of God and the tree of life and Jesus who is the resurrection and the life? How then could they have life apart from Jesus? All evidences point to the fact that the soul, apart from Jesus, will cease to be for eternity.

To make a scientific argument out of this, we have the first and second laws of thermodynamics. I will spare you an entire physics lesson and only mention a few things here. The second law speaks of entropy and heat transfer. That is, order moves naturally toward disorder and heat transfer occurs spontaneously from higher to lower temperature bodies but never spontaneously in the reverse direction. This is the law of energy degradation.

As I have previously said, the soul is a form of energy. Heat is also a form of energy. Heat can transfer onto a cold object making it hot but a cold object can never make a hot object cold. It works this way because cold is the absence of heat as darkness is also the absence of light. Energy is retained in heat so long as there is heat or energy around it to sustain it. Otherwise, it will lose its energy over time. So then what would become of a cold soul in absence of God who is the source of all energy? It will cease to be what it was and will degrade, will it not? Yes, in time it will dissolve. All of its energy will be used up without any life source because there is no such thing as self-sustaining energy sources. Only God is completely self-sustaining.

The first law of thermodynamics, the law of conservation of energy, states that energy can neither be created or destroyed, only transformed or transferred. This is consistent with Solomon’s wisdom in Ecclesiastes 12:7 “Then the dust will return to the earth as it was, and the spirit will return to God who gave it.” That is, when man, who is a living being dies, his body returns to the earth (with all its atoms and elements) and his soul/spirit returns back to God who originally breathed that life into him. That is, the energy of life returns back to God, not necessarily the consciousness. But whichever belief you hold, it is at this point that God decides what do to with the soul. And what will He do?

Matthew 10:28 says, “Do not fear those who kill the body but are unable to kill the soul; but rather fear Him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell.”

Jesus indicates here that people naturally fear death and that man has power over the body to kill it. They do not have the power to kill the soul though. God, however, has power over both body and soul to kill both of them through the fires of hell. The plain meaning of the text says that the body can die and the soul can die also. There is no reason that this should be taken hypothetically, for the admonition Jesus gives to “fear Him” has its true effect on His listeners for the very reason that God not only can kill the soul but that He will kill the soul (of all those who do not believe in Him). For what reason would people fear God if He never will act upon His power to bring about the death of the soul? It would be but empty threats. If Jesus believed in eternal conscious torment, He could have made it clear of all the pain and suffering one would endure for eternity. Surely that would be far worse than the death of the soul and would surely have a greater fear effect to make His point, don’t you think? Yet, Jesus mentions nothing of pain. I believe it is therefore a more fearful punishment to cease to exist forever than it is to dread the pain leading up to that death. Pain is temporary but the end of existence is forever and there is no coming back.

In conclusion of this section, we have established the fact that man is not inherently immortal because (1) Only God is immortal. (2) All life is in God and therefore apart from His presence there is no life. (3) Man cannot inherently sustain his own energy but rather it is God who upholds and sustains all life and energy in the universe continually by His grace and power. (4) The body will return to the dust from whence it came and the “breath of life” given to man from God who breathed into him will return to God to do as He pleases. (5) The natural laws of the universe dictate that all energy degrades over time and therefore the soul, being a form of energy, shall also degrade being by itself with no energy to transfer into it. (6) Jesus plainly tells us that the soul can be killed.

When speaking of the energy of the soul, I acknowledge that this is more of a scientific and philosophical argument and because of that, I do not intend that on this basis alone that it should prove conditional immortality. My intention, however, is for us to see the consistency of how Biblical theology works alongside our natural understanding of nature’s laws and does not contradict them. A more robust argument is made for conditional immortality for the very fact that Biblical theology supports and upholds these natural laws, while these laws also support and uphold Biblical theology. The view that I have presented here is a scientific and philosophical argument that defeats the Platonic philosophy of the soul’s immortality. That philosophy is in contradiction to natural law and if we were to uphold it, then it must be explained through some miraculous intervention in order to be true and the “why” for that intervention must be explained as well.

The view presented here is also theologically defensible in that only God possesses immortality, sustains, and upholds life because all life is in Him. Any other person, thing, or angelic being that has immortality has it only because God has imparted it to them and sustains them. Hell is a place apart from the presence of God and therefore, apart from His sustaining life which would otherwise endow length of days or immortality forever.