In this case, the allegedly contradictory passages to be focused on are from Ecclesiastes. One says that the dead have no knowledge or perception, lacking any emotion or activity. This would entail a total lack of conscious experience in an afterlife. The other passage does mention clearly that the spirit returns to God when dust returns to the ground. Dust returning to the ground is the Biblical description of what happens when the body dies (Genesis 3:19, Ecclesiastes 3:19-21) because God imbued dirt with the breath of life to create Adam (Genesis 2:7). Aside from this, if the spirit is confined to the body during life, then the spirit could only "return" after bodily death. Does the Bible teach conflicting afterlife positions in the same book?
Ecclesiastes 9:5-6, 10—"For the living know that they will die, but the dead know nothing; they have no further reward, and even their name is forgotten. Their love, their hate and their jealousy have long since vanished . . . Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might, for in the realm of the dead, where you are going, there is neither working nor planning nor knowledge nor wisdom."
Ecclesiastes 12:6-7—"Remember him—before the silver cord is severed, and the golden bowl is broken; before the pitcher is shattered at the spring, and the wheel broken at the well, and the dust returns to the ground it came from, and the spirit returns to God who made it."
What Ecclesiastes 12:6-7 does and does not say is crucial. Logically, a spirit does not have to cease to exist in order to be unconscious; in the same way, it is logically possible for someone still living on Earth to be in a dreamless sleep despite how this requires that they still exist. I am not assuming that spirits do exist after biological death, although consciousness is demonstrably immaterial in either case. It is simply not true that the concept of a spirit departing its body after death and still existing on some level requires that the soul remains in a state of perception, even to the point of recognizing or having the capacity to recognize self-evident truths like logical axioms or that mind's own existence.
This neither is said in Ecclesiastes 12 nor follows logically from what verses 6-7 do say. Ecclesiastes 9, on the other hand, is incredibly direct with its declaration that the dead think, perceive, and do nothing. They are not experiencing bliss or torment, for they are truly dead. Of course, if the dead really know nothing, not even that which is self-evident, they would have to be totally unconscious at best. Other parts of the Bible, when examined apart from assumptions, will often no longer even seem to contradict this, because either nothing is clarified in those verses about whether or not there is an afterlife or they are really about the afterlife following the resurrection (Daniel 12:2).
The book of Ecclesiastes does not teach contradictory philosophies of the afterlife, with verse 7 of chapter 12 suggesting nothing about the immediate entry to heaven that many Western readers simply assume, spurred on by theologians who are themselves merely assuming in their irrationalism. All it states is that the spirit returns to the God who created it, something that does not logically necessitate that the spirit would be conscious. Indeed, three chapters prior, the author makes some of the most plain and central statements about the state of the dead before the resurrection in the entire Bible. Not even Job 14:10-12, Psalm 6:5, and more are this explicit, unlike Job 3:11-19.
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