Saturday, December 9, 2017

On Dualism And Conditional Immortality

Conditional immortality is the theological position that human souls (or spirits/minds) are not inherently immortal and can live forever only because of salvation and restoration to God.  The Bible repeatedly teaches this, with, to give a small sampling, 1 Timothy 6:16 saying that God alone possesses inherent immortality and Romans 2:7 likewise describing only some humans as achieving immortality in the end.  Conditional immortality is simply Biblically true.

Recently, though, I've seen some Christians seemingly deny that there is a dualistic nature in humans--that humans have an immaterial side and a physical body (mind-body dualism).  I am a conscious mind housed in a body, and consciousness and mind are purely immaterial, while a body is a composed of physical matter.  Yet some would deny a dualistic human nature in order to get away from the shadow of the doctrine of eternal conscious torment.  Some would deny that the Bible affirms this kind of dualism.

But the Bible does teach mind-body dualism (James 2:26, Matthew 10:28, and so on).  Even if it did not, logic needs no other authorities for it to prove in full that a mind is objectively not the same as a body.  All that verses like Matthew 10:28 establish is that the Bible agrees with what reason can prove fully on its own--conscious minds are not bodies, and one is material and the other immaterial.  This does not mean that consciousness is immortal by its very nature or that God can't or won't destroy it (I've addressed this here [1]).  On its own, it doesn't even establish that our minds live on without our bodies until our bodies are resurrected, only that it is logically possible that they could, as other Scriptural support is required to verify this.  But annihilationism and conditional immortality are not threatened even if minds/souls do survive the deaths of their bodies and await their bodily resurrections.  Both the mind and body of an unbeliever will still be annihilated (2 Peter 2:6, Ezekiel 18:4, Romans 6:23)!

Since I recently have seen people argue that Matthew 10:28 doesn't teach some sort of mind-body dualism, I wanted to show how utterly absurd this is.  Matthew 10:28 couldn't even distinguish between body and soul if there was not any difference between them (just like how Scripture could not distinguish between Jesus and the Father if they were identical)!  The verse affirms that God can destroy the totality of our beings, our bodies and our consciousnesses, with finality and permanence in hell, and other passages clarify that this will indeed happen to those who are not saved [2].  Humans can kill our bodies, but they cannot destroy us forever; only God can do that to the fullness of our beings.  Matthew 10:28 does not teach eternal conscious torment and it does not deny mind-body dualism.  It is asinine for some to imply that the two are exclusive.

The word "soul" could refer to the totality of someone's being, mind and body, as some have pointed out.  It can also just refer to the conscious part.  Clearly, Matthew 10:28 does distinguish between the soul and the body.  Even if Matthew 10:28 somehow did not directly teach that humans are dualistic creatures (and it unavoidably does to at least some extent), James 2:26 clearly refers to the body and spirit of a person as different components.  Mind-body dualism is entirely Biblical, and even if Christianity were false, it remains true that a mind is not a body and thus dualism is still true by logical necessity.


[1].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/09/the-destruction-of-soul.html

[2].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/02/the-truth-of-annihilationism.html

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