Chapter 24
If you have read the first twenty-three chapters of this book, you already know that I believe Edward Fudge’s view of human nature is physicalist—even though he never uses the word. You have seen the exegetical evidence for substance dualism across more than seventy passages of Scripture. You have watched as we documented Fudge’s treatment of those passages: the ones he discussed, the ones he listed without exegesis, and the forty-eight he completely ignored.
But here is the thing. Fudge did not come up with this view of human nature on his own. He drew from a stream of thought that has been gaining momentum in the academy for decades. That stream has a name: Christian physicalism. And if we are going to understand why physicalism has become so influential in the conditional immortality movement—and why it is wrong—we need to understand it at its best. Not a straw man. Not a caricature. The real thing, presented by the scholars who have argued for it most carefully.
That is what this chapter does. We are going to meet the four most important Christian physicalist thinkers of the last thirty years: Nancey Murphy, Joel Green, Kevin Corcoran, and the team of Warren Brown and Brad Strawn. We will let them make their case in their own terms. We will present their arguments as strongly and as fairly as we can. And then we will ask the hard questions that their positions cannot answer.
I want you to understand something before we begin. These are serious scholars. They love Jesus. They take Scripture seriously—or at least they believe they do. I have no interest in questioning their faith or their motives. What I do want to question is whether their philosophical framework can actually hold the weight of what the Bible teaches about human nature, about death, about the intermediate state, and about the resurrection. I do not think it can. But you deserve to hear their best case before I tell you why.
All forms of Christian physicalism share one core conviction: there is no immaterial soul. Human beings are entirely physical creatures. There is no separate, nonphysical substance—no “ghost in the machine,” as the philosopher Gilbert Ryle once put it—that exists inside the body and could, in principle, survive the body’s destruction.1 When these thinkers say “physicalism,” they mean that everything about you—your thoughts, your personality, your memories, your capacity for prayer and worship—is ultimately a function of your physical body, especially your brain.
That does not mean they are atheists. It does not mean they think you are nothing but a lump of meat. Every Christian physicalist I have read insists that human beings are more than mere matter. They are matter that has been organized and sustained by God in ways that produce remarkable capacities—consciousness, moral reasoning, love, faith, relationship. But those capacities are not housed in a separate immaterial substance. They emerge from the physical organism itself, by God’s design and sustaining power.2
Beyond this shared denial of the soul, however, the major Christian physicalists disagree with each other on some important details. They differ on how to explain personal identity, on how to account for consciousness, and on what happens to a person at death and resurrection. These differences matter, and we need to trace them carefully.
Nancey Murphy is a philosopher and theologian at Fuller Theological Seminary, and she is arguably the most influential Christian physicalist in the English-speaking world. Her 2006 book Bodies and Souls, or Spirited Bodies? is a sustained argument that physicalism—not dualism—provides the best fit with Christian commitments.3 Her earlier essay, “Human Nature: Historical, Scientific, and Religious Issues,” set the stage by arguing that the history of theological anthropology has brought Christians to a point of decision between nonreductive physicalism and what she calls “holistic dualism,” with substance dualism dismissed as incompatible with Christian teaching.4
Murphy’s version of physicalism is called nonreductive because she insists that while human beings are entirely physical, we cannot fully explain human behavior by reducing it to physics and chemistry. She borrows from the philosophy of science the idea of “levels” of description. A human action can be described at the level of physics (neurons firing), the level of biology (an organism moving), the level of psychology (a person deciding), and even the level of morality or spirituality (a believer praying). Each level is real. Each level has its own language and its own explanatory power. But—and here is the key move—all of these levels are ultimately about the same physical entity. There is no separate, nonphysical thing doing the praying. It is the whole physical organism, described from a different angle.5
Murphy talks about “top-down causation” and “whole-part influence.” She argues that higher-level properties (like intentions, beliefs, and moral commitments) can exert causal influence on lower-level processes (like neural firing). A person’s decision to forgive someone, for example, can change patterns of brain activity. This is not dualism sneaking in through the back door, she insists. It is just how complex physical systems work. Higher-level features emerge from lower-level processes and then turn around and constrain those same processes.6
What about the soul? Murphy is blunt. The soul, for her, is not a separate, immaterial substance. It is a “functional capacity of a complex physical organism.”7 When Scripture speaks of the soul, it is not pointing to an invisible entity inside you. It is pointing to what you can do—think, feel, relate to God, exercise moral responsibility—because of how God has made your physical body. She embraces what she calls “ontological reductionism”—the view that as you move up the hierarchy of levels, no new metaphysical “ingredients” need to be added. Creation is, at bottom, physical.8
Murphy illustrates this with an example that makes the idea more concrete. Suppose a person orders a diversion of river water for a city’s use, and in doing so kills an endangered species of fish. That single event can be described biologically (an organism dies), psychologically (a person makes a decision with certain intentions), socially (a prudent move to offset drought conditions), morally (an immoral act that threatens an endangered species), and legally (a violation of environmental regulations). Following the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, Murphy says these are different “language games,” each with its own rules and its own vocabulary. But they are all describing the same physical event. There is no separate, nonphysical “moral substance” floating above the physical act. There is just the act, viewed from different angles. And Murphy says the same thing about the soul: there is no separate spiritual substance. There is just the physical person, described from the angle of theology and spirituality.
This is important to understand because Murphy’s position is not crude materialism. She is not saying that you are nothing but atoms bouncing around. She is saying that there are real, genuine higher-level properties—consciousness, moral agency, spiritual awareness—that emerge from the physical and can be spoken about in their own right. But ontologically, at the level of what actually exists, there is nothing beyond the physical. No extra ingredient. No immaterial soul. Just a remarkably complex physical organism that God has designed to exhibit capacities we rightly call “spiritual.”
Joel Green, a New Testament scholar, comes at the question from a different direction than Murphy. Where Murphy works primarily as a philosopher, Green works as a biblical scholar who brings the neurosciences into his interpretation of Scripture. His 2008 book Body, Soul, and Human Life argues that the exegetical task must be carried out “with the neurosciences fully in view.”9
Green’s basic claim is that the Bible does not teach what most Christians think it teaches about the soul. He argues that the traditional reading of “soul” in Scripture—as a reference to an immaterial substance that can exist apart from the body—is a product of Greek philosophical influence, not a faithful interpretation of the Hebrew and Greek texts themselves. When the Old Testament says nephesh (often translated “soul”), Green argues, it almost always means “person,” “life,” or “self”—not an immaterial entity. And when the New Testament uses psyche (the Greek equivalent), it follows the same pattern.10
What makes Green distinctive is his “neuro-hermeneutic.” He argues that modern neuroscience has demonstrated so tight a connection between brain activity and mental life that the old idea of a separate mind or soul is no longer tenable. Every thought, every emotion, every spiritual experience has a neural correlate. Damage to specific brain regions produces specific changes in personality, memory, and moral reasoning. If the soul were a separate substance doing the thinking, why would brain damage affect it so profoundly?11
Green deploys this neuro-hermeneutic to significant theological effect, particularly in undercutting what he calls “the presumption of the centrality to biblical eschatology of a disembodied intermediate state.”12 In other words, Green does not just deny the soul. He uses that denial to reshape how we read the Bible’s teaching about what happens between death and resurrection. If there is no soul to survive death, then perhaps the intermediate state is not what the church has always thought it was.
Green also leans heavily on the “Hebrew holism” argument we will discuss shortly. He argues that when we read the Old Testament on its own terms, without importing later Greek philosophical categories, we find a picture of the human person as an integrated whole. The nephesh is not a detachable soul but the living person considered as a needy, desiring, breathing creature. The ruach (spirit) is not an immaterial substance but the life-breath that God gives and can take away. Green makes this case with considerable exegetical skill, and I want to be fair: he does real work in the Hebrew text. He does not simply assert his conclusions. But the question is whether his conclusions actually follow from the data, or whether he has allowed a prior commitment to physicalism to narrow his reading of the evidence. We will return to that question in Section B.
Kevin Corcoran, a philosopher at Calvin University, offers yet another version of Christian physicalism. His 2006 book Rethinking Human Nature: A Christian Materialist Alternative to the Soul argues that human persons are constituted by their bodies but are not identical to them.13
Think of it this way. A statue and the lump of bronze that makes it up are not the same thing, even though they occupy the same space at the same time. The bronze could exist without being a statue (melt it down), and the statue could (in theory) be made of different material. The statue is constituted by the bronze but is not identical to it. Corcoran says something similar about persons and bodies. You are constituted by your body, but you are not simply identical to the particular collection of atoms that makes up your body right now. Your identity as a person is grounded in a “biological event” that is “remarkably stable, well individuated, self-directing, self-maintaining and homeodynamic.”14
What holds you together over time, on Corcoran’s view, is not a soul but what he calls “immanent causation”—the way earlier states of an organism bring about later states within that same organism.15 Your body is constantly replacing its material. The atoms in your body today are not the same atoms that were there seven years ago. But you are still the same person because there is an unbroken causal chain linking your earlier self to your present self through the ongoing biological life of your organism.
Corcoran was also a pioneer among Christian physicalists in thinking about what happens at death and resurrection. He explored the possibility of “gappy existence”—the idea that a person could cease to exist at death and come back into existence at the resurrection, with God preserving the causal continuity that makes the resurrected person the same individual who died.16 He also explored “fissioning” models in which God might split off a portion of the dying person’s body at the moment of death and preserve it until resurrection day. Both proposals have generated significant philosophical discussion.
Lynne Rudder Baker developed a similar constitution view. She argued that what makes someone a person is having the capacity for a “first-person perspective”—the ability to think of oneself as oneself. On her account, a human body that develops this capacity becomes a person, and a person exists as long as that first-person perspective persists.17 Baker applied this directly to the doctrine of resurrection, arguing that the sameness of a person before and after death consists in the sameness of their first-person perspective.18
Warren Brown is a neuroscientist, not a theologian, but his work has had significant influence in the Christian physicalism conversation. Together with Brad Strawn, he co-authored The Physical Nature of Christian Life (2012), which rejects dualism—claiming it leads to Gnosticism—and reconsiders theological topics like spiritual formation, sanctification, and the mission of the church in physicalist terms.19
Brown and Strawn bring the authority of neuroscience to the table. Their argument is straightforward: modern brain science has shown that everything we associate with the “soul”—personality, emotions, moral reasoning, religious experience—is produced by the brain. Brain scans show neural activity correlated with every mental event. Brain damage can alter personality beyond recognition. Diseases like Alzheimer’s can erase memory and identity. If the soul were an independent entity, they argue, these physical changes should not have such devastating effects on the person.20
Earlier, Brown co-authored with Murphy Did My Neurons Make Me Do It?—a book-length exploration of how physicalists can preserve moral responsibility and free will without appealing to an immaterial soul.21 Together, they represent the neuroscience wing of the Christian physicalism movement, grounding their rejection of the soul not primarily in biblical arguments but in what they take to be the clear deliverances of empirical science.
What is striking about Brown and Strawn’s approach is how confidently they move from scientific data to metaphysical conclusions. They observe (correctly) that brain states and mental states are correlated. They observe (correctly) that brain damage changes cognition, personality, and behavior. And from these observations they leap to the conclusion that the mind simply is the brain. But that leap is not justified by the evidence. It is a philosophical interpretation of the evidence—one that many scientists, including highly respected neuroscientists, do not share. We will examine this gap between the data and the interpretation in Section B.
It is also worth noting that Brown and Strawn’s claim that dualism leads to Gnosticism is historically careless. Gnosticism taught that the material world is evil and that the body is a prison from which the soul must escape. Substance dualism, as defended by the mainstream Christian tradition, teaches the opposite: the body is good, created by God, and destined for resurrection. The problem with Gnosticism was not that it believed in the soul—it was that it despised the body. These are very different errors, and conflating them does not help the physicalist case.
Despite their differences, these Christian physicalist thinkers share four main arguments against substance dualism. Understanding these arguments is essential, because they are the same arguments—sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly—that show up in Fudge’s treatment of human nature and in the broader CI movement.
First: “Hebrew holism” versus “Greek dualism.” This is the most popular argument and the one you are most likely to encounter. It goes like this: the Old Testament presents a holistic view of human nature in which body, soul, and spirit are not separate parts but different ways of describing the whole person. The idea of an immaterial soul that survives death is a Greek import—a Platonic idea that was read into the Bible by later Christian interpreters influenced by Greek philosophy. Faithful biblical interpretation requires us to strip away this foreign philosophy and recover the original Hebrew understanding of the person as an integrated whole.22
Second: neuroscience shows that mind equals brain. As we just saw with Brown and Strawn, this argument appeals to the correlation between brain states and mental states. Every thought has a neural correlate. Brain damage changes the person. Therefore, the mind is just what the brain does—there is no need for, and no evidence of, a separate soul.23
Third: the soul is a Platonic import, not a biblical concept. This overlaps with the first argument but extends it. The claim is not just that Hebrew anthropology is holistic, but that the very idea of an immaterial, separable soul comes from Plato, not from Moses or Paul. Christians adopted it during the early centuries of the church under the influence of Greek philosophy, and it has been sitting in our theology ever since like a Trojan horse. To be truly biblical, we need to let it go.24
Fourth: embodiment is essential to personhood. Human beings were made to be embodied. The resurrection of the body confirms this. God did not design us to float around as disembodied spirits. Full human existence requires a body. Therefore, the idea of a soul existing apart from the body—even temporarily, in an intermediate state—is theologically problematic.25
I have done my best to present Christian physicalism fairly. These are thoughtful positions held by serious people. But serious positions can have serious problems. And Christian physicalism has several that are difficult—perhaps impossible—to resolve.
The “Hebrew holism versus Greek dualism” argument sounds compelling. It has a nice ring to it. Hebrew = good, Greek = bad. Simple. Except it is not that simple. As John Cooper has demonstrated in painstaking detail, the alleged dichotomy between “Hebrew holism” and “Greek dualism” is itself a modern scholarly construction that does not hold up under scrutiny.26
Cooper makes several devastating observations. First, there were holists and monists among the Greeks too. The Stoics, for instance, were materialists. And there were dualist strands within Jewish thought that developed independently of Greek influence—or at least cannot be cleanly attributed to it. As D. S. Russell noted, the concept of a surviving nephesh in Sheol could have developed from the Psalms without any Greek input at all.27 The clean line between “Hebrew” and “Greek” is a scholarly mirage.
Second—and this is crucial—Cooper shows that holism does not entail monism. You can affirm that human beings function as an integrated whole (holism) without concluding that they are made of only one kind of stuff (monism). A computer functions as an integrated whole, but it has both hardware and software. The human body functions as an integrated whole, but that does not tell you whether it has both a material and an immaterial component. Cooper calls the biblical picture “holistic dualism”—a position in which body and soul are deeply integrated in life but genuinely distinct in nature.28
Third, the Old Testament itself, even on Cooper’s careful reading of the anthropological vocabulary, points away from monism. Adam is formed from the dust of the ground (a material component) but requires the breath of God (a nonmaterial, divinely-given component) before he becomes alive. Dust and ruach (spirit/breath) are not the same kind of thing. They come from different sources. The dust comes from the earth; the ruach comes from God. This is not Platonic dualism, but it is not monism either. It is a picture of human nature constituted from two irreducible principles.29
The argument from neuroscience—that brain states correlate with mental states, therefore the mind is the brain—makes an elementary philosophical mistake. It confuses correlation with identity. Cooper addresses this directly in Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting. The hard empirical data show that there are two different kinds of events—mental events and brain events—each of which appears to influence the other. When brain activity changes, mental states change. When a person initiates a mental act like thinking or imagining, brain activity changes in response. What we observe is a two-way correlation.30
But a correlation is not an identification. The observable data are consistent with several different philosophical theories. They are consistent with materialism. They are also consistent with dualistic interactionism—the view that mind and brain are distinct realities that causally influence each other. The brain data alone cannot settle the question. As Cooper puts it, “the observable data from brain physiology and physiological psychology underdetermine all philosophical theories alike.”31
Think of it this way. A pianist’s music depends on the piano. If you damage the piano, the music changes. If you destroy the piano, the music stops. Does this prove that the pianist is the piano? Of course not. It proves that the pianist needs the piano to produce music in this context. The dependence of the mind on the brain during earthly life is exactly what a dualist would expect if God designed body and soul to work together as an integrated unit. Brain damage is devastating precisely because the soul and body are so deeply intertwined during this life—not because the soul does not exist.
The claim that the soul is “a Platonic import, not a biblical concept” commits what philosophers call the genetic fallacy—judging the truth of an idea by its origin rather than by its evidence. Even if the early church were influenced by Greek philosophy in developing the doctrine of the soul (which is debatable), that would not make the doctrine false. The question is whether the biblical text, rightly interpreted, teaches or assumes the existence of an immaterial self that can survive the body’s death. As we have argued across thirteen chapters of exegesis, it does.32
Furthermore, the charge is historically misleading. The dualism that we find in the church fathers and in the major creeds is not Platonic dualism. The early Christians explicitly rejected core elements of Platonism—the preexistence of souls, the inherent immortality of the soul, the notion that the body is a prison. They affirmed instead that the soul is created by God, that the body is good, and that bodily resurrection is the final hope. The substance dualism defended in this book stands in that tradition. It has far more in common with the biblical picture of Genesis 2:7—where God forms body and breathes in soul—than with anything Plato ever imagined.33
The fourth argument—that embodiment is essential to personhood—contains a real insight but draws the wrong conclusion. Yes, God made us to be embodied. Yes, the resurrection of the body is the final goal. Substance dualists affirm all of this enthusiastically. The soul without a body is, in a sense, incomplete. That is precisely why God promises resurrection.34
But “embodiment is the ideal” is a very different claim from “embodiment is metaphysically necessary for personal existence.” The intermediate state—the period between a believer’s death and the final resurrection—is, by definition, a period when the person exists without their earthly body. Paul said that to depart and be with Christ is “far better” (Phil. 1:23). Jesus told the thief on the cross, “Today you will be with Me in Paradise” (Luke 23:43). The souls under the altar in Revelation cry out to God (Rev. 6:9–11). If embodiment is metaphysically necessary for personal existence, none of these texts makes sense.
The substance dualist can actually do more justice to the importance of embodiment than the physicalist can. On our view, the soul was designed for embodiment. The soul has what Moreland and Rae call a natural “aptness for embodiment”—it is made to be joined with a body, and it reaches its fullest expression only when united with a body in the way God intended.34 That is why the intermediate state, while blessed (for believers), is not the final state. The final state is resurrection—body and soul reunited, glorified, and made new. The dualist affirms both the value of embodiment and the soul’s capacity to exist (in a diminished, incomplete way) apart from the body. The physicalist, by making embodiment an absolute requirement, actually undermines the hope of the intermediate state—the very hope that Paul found comforting enough to prefer over staying alive (Phil. 1:21–24).
Of all the problems facing Christian physicalism, the intermediate state is the most devastating. This is not just my opinion. John Cooper has called it the single most compelling reason for Christians to embrace some form of substance dualism, and I believe he is right.35
Here is the problem, stated as simply as I can. The Bible teaches that when believers die, they are consciously with Christ before the final resurrection. Paul tells the Philippians that to depart (i.e., die) is to be “with Christ” (Phil. 1:23). He tells the Corinthians that to be “absent from the body” is to be “present with the Lord” (2 Cor. 5:8). Jesus promises the thief on the cross immediate entrance into Paradise (Luke 23:43). The souls under the altar in Revelation are conscious, speaking, and aware of what is happening on earth (Rev. 6:9–11). Peter teaches that Christ preached “to the spirits in prison” (1 Pet. 3:19) and that the gospel was preached “to those who are dead” (1 Pet. 4:6). Hebrews speaks of “the spirits of just men made perfect” (Heb. 12:23).36
These passages are not obscure. They are not peripheral. They form a consistent thread running through the New Testament: death separates the person from their earthly body, but the person continues to exist in conscious fellowship with God until the resurrection.
Now, if physicalism is true—if there is no immaterial soul that can exist apart from the body—then what exactly is present with the Lord between death and resurrection? What is doing the speaking under the altar? What is hearing the gospel preached by Christ in the spirit world? The body is in the grave, decomposing. If you are your body, then you are in the grave, decomposing. There is no “you” to be with Christ.
Cooper puts it this way in his chapter in Christian Physicalism?: the eschatological narrative of disembodied existence between death and final resurrection is not derived from experience or philosophical reflection. It is revealed in the Bible—implied by the Hebrew Scriptures and explicitly affirmed in the New Testament.37 And this revealed narrative is simply incompatible with any form of bodily monism—any view that makes the body metaphysically necessary for personal existence.
Christian physicalists have proposed several workarounds. Let me briefly note the most important ones and explain why each one fails.
Some physicalists, following Corcoran and Trenton Merricks, have proposed that a person could cease to exist entirely at death and then come back into existence at the resurrection. The gap in existence is just that—a gap. God, who created you once, can create you again. Your personal identity is preserved not by continuous existence but by God’s sovereign act of re-creating you with the same identity.38
The problem is obvious. If you ceased to exist at death and God creates someone with all your memories and characteristics at the resurrection, how do we know that the resurrected person is really you and not a copy? What is the principled difference between God re-creating you and God creating a duplicate? On this view, as Cooper argues, multiple replication becomes logically possible. Even if God would not create two John Coopers on resurrection day, an omnipotent being hypothetically could. And if two copies could exist, neither of them can be the original. The link between the earthly person and the resurrected person becomes contingent—dependent on God’s decision not to make duplicates—rather than grounded in the identity of the person herself.39
But there is a deeper problem still. Gappy existence flatly contradicts the biblical texts about the intermediate state. If the dead cease to exist until the resurrection, then Paul was wrong to say that departing is to be “with Christ.” Being with Christ and being nonexistent are not the same thing. The souls under the altar in Revelation are not gaps in existence; they are conscious, vocal persons. You cannot be absent from the body and nonexistent. These are different states.
Some physicalists try to avoid the intermediate state altogether by proposing that God resurrects believers immediately at death. On this view, there is no gap between death and resurrection because the resurrection happens the instant you die. The intermediate state is not a distinct period; it is simply what the moment of death looks like from the standpoint of eternity.40
This view has some superficial appeal, but it creates more problems than it solves. The New Testament consistently presents the resurrection as a future event—something that has not yet happened for believers who have died but will happen when Christ returns. Paul writes that “the dead in Christ will rise first” at the coming of the Lord (1 Thess. 4:16). The entire argument of 1 Corinthians 15 is built on the premise that the resurrection is yet to come. If every believer is immediately resurrected at death, then the future resurrection at Christ’s return becomes redundant or empty.41
Furthermore, the intermediate state texts explicitly presuppose that believers exist without their resurrection bodies for a time. Paul describes being “absent from the body” and “present with the Lord” (2 Cor. 5:8)—not “in a new body and present with the Lord.” The souls under the altar are told to “rest a little while longer” until the full number of martyrs is complete (Rev. 6:11). They are waiting. Waiting implies that the final state has not yet arrived.
John Polkinghorne, a physicist-turned-theologian, proposed that what survives death is not a soul but an “information-bearing pattern”—a kind of divine blueprint of the person that God holds in memory and uses to reconstitute the person at the resurrection.42 Others have endorsed similar ideas. Murphy speaks of God preserving the person’s unique pattern until resurrection. Green seems to lean in this direction as well.
But notice what has happened here. The physicalist has replaced the soul with a divine memory or “pattern.” The pattern is not a physical thing—it is information stored (somehow) in the mind of God. It is not conscious. It is not present with Christ. It is not crying out under the altar. It is a theological abstraction that does none of the work the intermediate state requires.
Moreover, the personal identity problem returns with full force. An information-bearing pattern is, by definition, something that can be copied. If God holds the “pattern” of John Cooper in His mind, what prevents Him (in principle) from instantiating that pattern twice? The result would be two people who are both “John Cooper” by every criterion the physicalist can offer. But both cannot be John Cooper, because John Cooper is one person, not two. As Cooper observes, the physicalist’s notion of personal identity here has been reduced to a similarity criterion rather than a genuine identity criterion, and similarity is not the same as identity.43
Let me press on the personal identity problem a bit further, because I think it is one of the most underappreciated weaknesses of Christian physicalism.
On substance dualism, personal identity across time—and across the gap of death—has a straightforward explanation. The soul is the locus of self-identity. It endures continuously as the self-same entity throughout life, during the intermediate state, and after the resurrection of the body. It remains numerically identical even if your personality changes, your body changes, or your brain is damaged. The soul cannot fail to be self-identical, because it is a simple, unified substance.44
On physicalism, personal identity must be grounded in the body—and the body presents notorious difficulties. The material composition of your body changes constantly. The atoms in your body today are almost entirely different from the atoms that were there a decade ago. What makes you the same person? Corcoran appeals to the “biological life” of the organism—the self-directing, self-maintaining process that connects your earlier body to your later body through immanent causation.45
But as the contributors to Christian Physicalism? have shown, Corcoran’s solution raises more questions than it answers. His description of life as “self-directing” and “self-maintaining” is teleological—it describes goals that the system has. But physicalism generally holds that at the fundamental level, the world described by physics involves only undirected efficient causation, not teleology. If teleology emerges from the nonteleological, this is no less puzzling than the claim that conscious persons emerge from an unconscious, impersonal world.46
Furthermore, Corcoran’s appeal to a “common life” seems to assume precisely what needs to be explained. To talk about a single, unified, persistent human life as “self-directing” presupposes that there is a single unified persistent thing doing the directing. But that is the very thing the physicalist needs to account for. As Dean Zimmerman and others have argued, it is far from obvious that just one life emerges from the constantly changing “storm of atoms” that constitutes a human body at any given time.47
I want to return to Murphy for a moment, because there is a deep tension in her position that deserves attention. She insists that her physicalism is nonreductive—that higher-level properties like consciousness, moral reasoning, and spiritual experience are real and cannot be explained away by reducing them to physics. But at the same time, she explicitly embraces ontological reductionism—the view that no new metaphysical “ingredients” are added as you move up the hierarchy of complexity. Creation is, at bottom, physical.48
These two commitments pull in opposite directions. If creation is ontologically physical all the way through, then mental properties either are physical properties (in which case the nonreductionism is hollow) or they are genuine, nonphysical properties that emerge from the physical (in which case the ontological reductionism is violated). Murphy wants to have it both ways, but the logic does not cooperate.
This problem becomes acute when we consider the actual character of conscious experience—what philosophers call qualia. What is it like to see red? What is it like to feel pain? What is it like to be overwhelmed by the beauty of a sunset? These experiences have a qualitative, first-person character that seems fundamentally different from anything we can describe in the language of neurons and neurotransmitters. The substance dualist says these properties belong to the soul. The physicalist must say they are somehow identical to, or produced by, purely physical processes. But no one has ever explained how physical processes give rise to subjective experience. This is what philosopher David Chalmers has famously called “the hard problem of consciousness.”49 Christian physicalism inherits this problem in full.
Joel Green’s neuro-hermeneutic raises a different kind of concern. Green insists that we should read the Bible “with the neurosciences fully in view.” But this smuggles a philosophical conclusion into the hermeneutical starting point. If you begin by assuming that neuroscience has established physicalism (it has not, as we saw above), and then you read Scripture through that lens, of course you will not find a soul in the text. You have ruled it out before you started reading.50
A faithful hermeneutic works the other way around. We come to the text asking what it teaches, not asking how to make it conform to a prior philosophical commitment. As we demonstrated across Chapters 5 through 18, when you let the biblical text speak on its own terms—following the grammar, the narrative logic, and the theological context—what emerges is not physicalism but substance dualism. Rachel’s soul departs at death (Gen. 35:18). The child’s soul returns to his body at Elijah’s prayer (1 Kings 17:21–22). The spirit returns to God who gave it (Eccl. 12:7). God can destroy both soul and body in hell (Matt. 10:28). These texts do not merely allow a dualist reading; they require one.
There is another angle on this problem that deserves attention, and it comes from Christology—the doctrine of Christ. If physicalism is true, then it must be true of Jesus as well. Christ took on full human nature. If human nature is entirely physical, then Christ’s human nature was entirely physical. And that means that when Jesus died on the cross, His human existence ceased entirely. There was no human soul of Christ that descended to the dead, preached to the spirits in prison (1 Pet. 3:18–20), or was “in Paradise” with the thief on Good Friday. The Apostles’ Creed says He “descended to the dead.” But if there was no soul to descend, what descended? A corpse does not descend anywhere except into the ground.
The contributors to Christian Physicalism? have pressed this point powerfully. James Turner explored how physicalist models of resurrection fare when applied to Christ’s intermediate state on Holy Saturday—and the results are deeply unsatisfying. Luke Van Horn examined what he calls the problem of a “soulless Savior”—a Christ whose human existence was interrupted by nonexistence between the cross and the empty tomb. As Oliver Crisp has acknowledged, any materialist Christology must face the hard question of what happened to the person of Christ between death and resurrection. If Christ ceased to exist as a human person on Holy Saturday, then the hypostatic union—the union of divine and human natures in one person—was broken. And if the hypostatic union was broken, the theological implications are staggering.61
The substance dualist has no such problem. Christ’s human soul continued to exist after the crucifixion. It was this soul that descended to the dead. It was this soul that was “in Paradise” with the repentant thief. The hypostatic union was never broken, because the divine nature remained united with the human soul throughout Holy Saturday. This is the traditional understanding, and it is the one that makes the best sense of the biblical data.
Cooper’s chapter in Christian Physicalism? brings all of these threads together in what I consider the definitive argument against Christian physicalism from a biblical standpoint. His conclusion deserves to be quoted carefully: because no anthropology that is inconsistent with Scripture can be regarded as Christian or true, any anthropology endorsed by Christians must allow for the separation of existing persons from their bodies between death and the general resurrection. Bodily monism, which includes materialism and physicalism, either rules out this possibility or cannot provide an adequate philosophical account of it—particularly the identity of earthly persons with resurrected persons. Therefore, bodily monism is either defeated or seriously undermined as a Christian philosophical anthropology.51
Cooper adds a theological observation that cuts deep. It is hard to understand why the God who creates, redeems, and perfects His human image-bearers for everlasting fellowship despite sin and death would choose bodily monism instead of holistic dualism as the metaphysics most conducive to His project. Holistic dualism gives God exactly the tools He needs: a soul that can survive death and remain in fellowship with Him, and a body that will be raised and reunited with that soul on the last day. Physicalism removes one of those tools and then scrambles to replace it with implausible substitutes.52
One more point should not be overlooked. The overwhelming consensus of the Christian theological tradition—across Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant lines, from the church fathers through the medieval period and the Reformation and into the modern era—has affirmed some form of body-soul dualism. Calvin was a substance dualist. Luther was a substance dualist (though he debated the intermediate state’s nature). Augustine was a substance dualist. Aquinas, while working within a hylomorphic framework, explicitly identified the rational soul as a substance capable of separate existence.53 The early creeds affirm the resurrection of the body, which presupposes that the person who rises is the same person who died—a claim that only makes sense if something (the soul) persists through death to ground that identity.
Christian physicalism is a very recent development. Murphy published her major work in 2006. Green published his in 2008. Corcoran published his in 2006. Before these works appeared, the Christian consensus was clear: human beings have souls. That does not automatically make the consensus right. But it does mean that the physicalists bear a heavy burden of proof. They are asking us to overturn nearly two thousand years of theological reflection—and I do not believe they have made their case.
The contributors to Christian Physicalism?—a volume specifically devoted to philosophical and theological criticisms of Christian physicalism—have made this point from multiple angles. Charles Taliaferro has argued that physicalism cannot adequately account for sin and moral agency. Jonathan Loose has shown that the constitution view faces devastating problems with personal identity at the resurrection. Howard Robinson, a veteran critic of physicalism in the broader philosophical literature, has argued that the very notion of “nonreductive physicalism” is unstable—that any position which takes mental properties seriously enough to preserve moral agency and spiritual life inevitably collapses into either reductive physicalism (which denies the reality of the mental) or some form of dualism (which acknowledges it).60 The cumulative weight of these critiques is considerable, and the physicalist literature has not adequately responded to them.
There is something deeply ironic about the trajectory of Christian physicalism. Its proponents set out to simplify Christian anthropology by eliminating the soul. But in the process, they have created a tangle of philosophical problems—gappy existence, fissioning, information-bearing patterns, constitution views, immediate resurrection proposals—each more complex and speculative than the doctrine they sought to replace. The soul is a simple, elegant answer to a question that physicalism cannot answer simply: What makes you you across time, across change, and across the gap of death? The soul endures. The body does not. That is what Scripture teaches. That is what the Christian tradition has always affirmed. And that is what the evidence, both biblical and philosophical, continues to support.
A physicalist might respond: “You accuse Green of circular reasoning, but you are doing the same thing. You come to the text assuming dualism and then find it everywhere.”
Fair enough. Everyone brings assumptions to the text. The question is which set of assumptions produces a reading that makes better sense of the whole biblical witness. As we demonstrated in Chapters 5 through 18, the dualist reading makes sense of passages that the physicalist reading cannot accommodate without distortion: the departure of the soul at death (Gen. 35:18; 1 Kings 17:21–22), the conscious existence of the dead in the intermediate state (Luke 16:19–31; Rev. 6:9–11; 1 Pet. 3:19), the distinction between soul and body in Jesus’s teaching (Matt. 10:28), and the language of “spirit” as something separable from the body (Luke 23:46; Acts 7:59; Heb. 12:23). The physicalist must either explain these texts away as metaphorical, dismiss them as accommodations to popular belief, or simply ignore them. The dualist can take them at face value. That is not a small advantage.54
Nobody denies the dependence of the mind on the brain during earthly life. Substance dualists affirm this freely. The soul and body are designed to work together. That is why brain damage is devastating. The soul uses the brain the way a musician uses an instrument. When the instrument is damaged, the music suffers. But the musician still exists.55
Moreover, as Cooper notes, some highly respected neuroscientists have concluded that the data favor dualism, not physicalism. Wilder Penfield, after decades of neurosurgery, concluded that it is easier to account for human existence on the basis of two elements than one. Sir John Eccles, a Nobel Laureate for his work in brain physiology, was a committed dualist who argued that the soul is the self capable of experience, nonmaterial and therefore not subject to disintegration at death.56 Neuroscience does not compel physicalism. It is consistent with both physicalism and dualism, and competent scientists can be found on both sides.
Some physicalists, as we noted, appeal to immediate resurrection, gappy existence, or divine preservation of an information-bearing pattern. But these proposals either deny what the text actually says (that the dead exist without their resurrection bodies for a time) or replace the soul with something that does the soul’s job under a different label. If God is preserving your personal identity through an “information-bearing pattern” held in His mind between your death and your resurrection, how is that meaningfully different from saying that God is preserving your soul? The physicalist has the concept; she just refuses the word.
This is true. There are Thomistic dualists, Cartesian dualists, emergent dualists, and more. Cooper himself acknowledges that many forms of substance dualism could cohere with the biblical data.58 But diversity within dualism is not an argument for physicalism. The fact that dualists disagree about the exact nature of the soul does not undermine the shared conviction that the soul exists and can survive the body’s death. That shared conviction is what the biblical evidence requires.
This is an objection I take very seriously, because it comes from the heart of the CI movement. Many conditionalists are not philosophers. They are pastors and laypeople who just want to know what the Bible says. And they worry that bringing in philosophy—whether dualist or physicalist—will distort the text.
I understand that concern. But here is the irony: physicalism is also a philosophy. When Fudge says that nephesh means “the whole person” and not an immaterial soul, he is making a philosophical claim about what human beings are. When Green says we should read the Bible “with the neurosciences fully in view,” he is importing a philosophical framework into his exegesis. When Murphy says the soul is merely a “functional capacity of a complex physical organism,” she is not reading that off the pages of Genesis. She is bringing a philosophical commitment to the text. The question is not whether we bring a philosophy to the text. The question is whether we bring the right one.
And the plain reading of Scripture, on its face, is dualist. When Rachel died, “her soul was departing” (Gen. 35:18). When Elijah prayed, the child’s soul “came back to him” (1 Kings 17:22). When Jesus warned His disciples, He told them to fear the one who can “destroy both soul and body in hell” (Matt. 10:28). When Stephen was being stoned, he cried out, “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit” (Acts 7:59)—not “Lord Jesus, receive my whole person,” or “Lord Jesus, receive the information-bearing pattern that constitutes my personal identity.” He said spirit. He said it because he believed, as Jesus had taught, that his spirit was something real, something separable from the body that was being destroyed by the stones, something that could be received by the risen Christ. A person reading these texts without any philosophical agenda would naturally conclude that the soul is something distinct from the body. It takes a considerable amount of philosophical effort to read these texts otherwise.59
Christian physicalism is a serious philosophical position defended by serious scholars. It deserves to be heard, and I hope I have presented it fairly. But it cannot do the work that Christian theology requires. It cannot account for the intermediate state without either denying what Scripture teaches or smuggling in the soul by another name. It cannot ground personal identity across the gap of death without resorting to proposals that are either philosophically dubious or theologically insufficient. And its signature arguments—the Hebrew holism narrative, the neuroscience argument, the charge that the soul is a Platonic import—are each weaker than they appear at first glance.
Let me be direct about what I am saying and what I am not saying. I am not saying that Murphy, Green, Corcoran, and Brown are bad scholars. They are not. I am not saying they are not Christians. They are. I am not even saying that every point they raise is without merit. The emphasis on human embodiment, for example, is genuinely helpful. The reminder that Hebrew anthropology is holistic is a valid corrective to any version of dualism that treats the body as unimportant. The attention to neuroscience is appropriate—the brain is an astonishing organ, and understanding it better can only help us appreciate the Creator’s design.
What I am saying is that when you take all of these insights and build them into a philosophical system that denies the existence of the soul, you end up with a system that cannot sustain the weight of what Scripture actually teaches. You end up having to explain away texts that are, on their face, dualist. You end up having to invent elaborate mechanisms—gappy existence, fissioning, information-bearing patterns—to do the work that the soul was always there to do. You end up in tension with the overwhelming consensus of the Christian theological tradition. And you end up with a view of death that offers the believer less comfort than the one Jesus gave the thief on the cross: “Today you will be with Me in Paradise.”
The conditional immortality movement does not need physicalism. Fudge did not need it. Chris Date and the Rethinking Hell community do not need it. CI is an eschatological claim about the final fate of the wicked. It stands or falls on its own exegetical merits, regardless of whether you believe in an immaterial soul. And as we will argue more fully in Chapter 27, CI is actually stronger when built on dualist foundations. The God who can destroy “both soul and body in hell” (Matt. 10:28) is the God of substance dualism. He recognizes that we are more than our bodies. He recognizes that we have souls. And He recognizes that both must be dealt with in the final judgment.
In the next chapter, we will turn from theology and exegesis to philosophy and press the case against physicalism from a different angle: the powerful philosophical arguments for the reality of the soul. But the verdict from this chapter is already clear. Christian physicalism is an impressive intellectual project—but it is built on a foundation that cannot bear the weight of the biblical witness. The intermediate state is the rock on which every form of bodily monism founders. And the soul is still standing.
↑ 1. Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (London: Hutchinson, 1949). Ryle’s famous phrase “the ghost in the machine” was intended as a critique of Cartesian dualism, but it has become a touchstone in the broader physicalist literature.
↑ 2. This is a fair summary of the shared conviction across Murphy, Green, Corcoran, and Brown/Strawn. Each would nuance it differently, but all reject the existence of an immaterial soul as a separate substance.
↑ 3. Nancey Murphy, Bodies and Souls, or Spirited Bodies? (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
↑ 4. Nancey Murphy, “Human Nature: Historical, Scientific, and Religious Issues,” in Whatever Happened to the Soul? Scientific and Theological Portraits of Human Nature, eds. Warren S. Brown, Nancey Murphy, and H. Newton Malony (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1998), 1–30. Murphy dismisses substance dualism (which she labels “radical dualism”) as not “compatible with Christian teaching” (p. 19).
↑ 5. Murphy, Bodies and Souls, or Spirited Bodies?, chaps. 2–4. See also Nancey Murphy and Warren S. Brown, Did My Neurons Make Me Do It? Philosophical and Neurobiological Perspectives on Moral Responsibility and Free Will (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 78–84.
↑ 6. Murphy, Bodies and Souls, or Spirited Bodies?, chaps. 3–4. Murphy draws on the philosophy of science to argue that higher-level properties can exercise “top-down causation” on lower-level processes without invoking an immaterial substance.
↑ 7. Murphy, “Human Nature: Historical, Scientific, and Religious Issues,” 18. This is a direct characterization of Murphy’s position from her own work.
↑ 8. Nancey Murphy, “Nonreductive Physicalism: Philosophical Issues,” in Whatever Happened to the Soul?, 129–130. Murphy writes that ontological reductionism holds that “as one goes up the hierarchy of levels, no new metaphysical ‘ingredients’ need to be added.”
↑ 9. Joel B. Green, Body, Soul, and Human Life: The Nature of Humanity in the Bible (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2008).
↑ 10. Green, Body, Soul, and Human Life, chaps. 2–3. See also Joel B. Green, “Eschatology and the Nature of Humans: A Reconsideration of Pertinent Biblical Evidence,” Science and Christian Belief 14, no. 1 (April 2002): 33–50.
↑ 11. Green, Body, Soul, and Human Life, chap. 1, “The Bible, the Natural Sciences, and the Human Person.”
↑ 12. Joel B. Green, “Eschatology and the Nature of Humans,” 33–50. Green explicitly uses his neuro-hermeneutic to undercut the intermediate state.
↑ 13. Kevin Corcoran, Rethinking Human Nature: A Christian Materialist Alternative to the Soul (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2006).
↑ 14. Kevin Corcoran, “Physical Persons and Postmortem Survival without Temporal Gaps,” in Soul, Body, and Survival: Essays on the Metaphysics of Human Persons, ed. Kevin Corcoran (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 201–217. The quoted phrase is Corcoran’s characterization of biological life.
↑ 15. Corcoran, Rethinking Human Nature, chap. 4. Corcoran defines immanent causation as a process in which “a state x of thing A brings about a consequent state y in A itself.”
↑ 16. Corcoran, “Physical Persons and Postmortem Survival without Temporal Gaps,” in Soul, Body, and Survival. See also Trenton Merricks, “How to Live Forever without Saving Your Soul: Physicalism and Immortality,” in the same volume, 183–200.
↑ 17. Lynne Rudder Baker, Persons and Bodies: A Constitution View (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
↑ 18. Lynne Rudder Baker, “Persons and the Metaphysics of Resurrection,” Religious Studies 43 (2007): 339–340. Baker argues that the persistence conditions of the constitution view make it “the most attractive option for Christians.”
↑ 19. Warren S. Brown and Brad D. Strawn, The Physical Nature of Christian Life: Neuroscience, Psychology, and the Church (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
↑ 20. Brown and Strawn, The Physical Nature of Christian Life, chaps. 1–3.
↑ 21. Murphy and Brown, Did My Neurons Make Me Do It? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
↑ 22. This argument appears in various forms throughout the literature. Green presents it most extensively in Body, Soul, and Human Life, chaps. 2–3. Fudge relies on it in The Fire That Consumes, pp. 25–30, drawing on H. W. Wolff and A. T. Nikolainen. Cooper critiques it in Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting: Biblical Anthropology and the Monism-Dualism Debate (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2000), chaps. 2–3.
↑ 23. Brown and Strawn, The Physical Nature of Christian Life; Green, Body, Soul, and Human Life, chap. 1.
↑ 24. This argument is found throughout Green’s work and in Murphy, Bodies and Souls, or Spirited Bodies?, 16. As Cooper notes, Calvin had already written against Anabaptist belief in soul-sleep, and the intermediate state was integral to Catholic doctrine long before the Reformation.
↑ 25. Green, Body, Soul, and Human Life, 46, is “open to any view in which embodiment is essential for but nonreductive of persons.”
↑ 26. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chaps. 2–4. This critique is one of the most important contributions of Cooper’s work. He shows that the “Hebrew holism vs. Greek dualism” dichotomy is a modern scholarly construction, not an ancient reality.
↑ 27. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chap. 4, “The Intertestamental Period.” Cooper cites D. S. Russell and others who argue that Jewish belief in a surviving soul could have developed from internal biblical resources.
↑ 28. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chap. 8. Cooper’s term “holistic dualism” captures the biblical picture precisely: body and soul are deeply integrated in life but genuinely distinct in nature.
↑ 29. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chap. 2. Cooper argues that the Old Testament picture of human nature—constituted from dust (material) and ruach (divine breath)—is incompatible with any form of substantial monism, whether materialist, idealist, or dual-aspect.
↑ 30. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chap. 8, “Dualism and Modern Science.”
↑ 31. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chap. 8. This is a crucial observation that undermines the neuroscience argument for physicalism.
↑ 32. The genetic fallacy consists in evaluating the truth or falsity of a claim based on its origin rather than its evidence. Even if the doctrine of the soul were influenced by Greek philosophy (a contested claim), this would not make it false. See Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chap. 1.
↑ 33. See Stewart Goetz and Charles Taliaferro, A Brief History of the Soul (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), chaps. 1–3, for a careful account of how Christian thinkers adapted and transformed Platonic ideas about the soul while rejecting core Platonic commitments.
↑ 34. See J. P. Moreland and Scott B. Rae, Body & Soul: Human Nature and the Crisis in Ethics (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2000), chap. 7. Moreland and Rae argue that the soul’s natural aptness for embodiment is built into its God-given nature.
↑ 35. Cooper, “Absent from the Body … Present with the Lord: Is the Intermediate State Fatal to Physicalism?” in Christian Physicalism? Philosophical Theological Criticisms, eds. R. Keith Loftin and Joshua R. Farris (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2018), chap. 16.
↑ 36. These passages are treated in detail in Chapters 13–14 of this book. See also Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chaps. 5–7, for the most thorough biblical treatment of the intermediate state.
↑ 37. Cooper, “Absent from the Body,” in Christian Physicalism?, chap. 16.
↑ 38. Merricks, “How to Live Forever without Saving Your Soul,” in Soul, Body, and Survival, 183–200. Corcoran also explores this possibility in Rethinking Human Nature, chap. 6.
↑ 39. Cooper, “Absent from the Body,” in Christian Physicalism?, chap. 16. The “multiple replication” objection is devastating to gappy existence proposals. If personal identity is not grounded in a continuously existing entity (the soul), then there is no principled reason why God could not instantiate the same “pattern” twice.
↑ 40. This view is associated with John Polkinghorne, Science and Theology: An Introduction (London: SPCK, 1998), chap. 3; and Nancey Murphy, Bodies and Souls, or Spirited Bodies?, 132–142. Others who endorse or explore versions of this view include Green, Body, Soul, and Human Life, 178–180.
↑ 41. See Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chap. 7, for a careful demonstration that the New Testament consistently treats the resurrection as a future event.
↑ 42. John Polkinghorne, “Human Destiny,” in Science and Theology, 115–116. Cooper discusses and critiques this view in “Absent from the Body,” in Christian Physicalism?, chap. 16.
↑ 43. Cooper, “Absent from the Body,” in Christian Physicalism?, chap. 16. Cooper argues that the physicalist’s reliance on a “personal essence” or “information-bearing pattern” reduces personal identity to a similarity criterion rather than genuine numerical identity.
↑ 44. Cooper, “Absent from the Body,” in Christian Physicalism?, chap. 16. See also Rickabaugh and Moreland, The Substance of Consciousness, chap. 7, “Personal Identity.”
↑ 45. Corcoran, Rethinking Human Nature, chap. 4.
↑ 46. This critique is developed in the chapter on Corcoran by Angus Menuge in Christian Physicalism?. See also the broader discussion of teleology and physicalism in Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
↑ 47. Dean Zimmerman, “The Compatibility of Materialism and Survival,” Faith and Philosophy 16, no. 2 (April 1999): 194–212. See also Jonathan Loose, “Constitution and the Falling Elevator: The Continuing Incompatibility of Materialism and Resurrection Belief,” Philosophia Christi 14, no. 2 (2012): 439–449.
↑ 48. Murphy, “Nonreductive Physicalism,” in Whatever Happened to the Soul?, 129–130.
↑ 49. David Chalmers, The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). The “hard problem of consciousness” is why and how physical processes give rise to subjective, first-person experience.
↑ 50. This is a version of the concern raised by Cooper in Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chap. 1, about allowing external philosophical commitments to override the plain sense of the biblical text.
↑ 51. Cooper, “Absent from the Body,” in Christian Physicalism?, chap. 16. This is Cooper’s summary conclusion.
↑ 52. Cooper, “Absent from the Body,” in Christian Physicalism?, chap. 16.
↑ 53. Aquinas explicitly identifies the rational soul as a substance in Summa Contra Gentiles, Book Two, chaps. 56 and 68, and in the proem to the Summa Theologica, Ia’s “Treatise on Man.” See the discussion in Christian Physicalism?, chap. 2.
↑ 54. See the detailed exegetical treatments in Chapters 5–18 of this book. The cumulative weight of these passages—including many that Fudge completely ignored—provides an overwhelming case for the biblical reality of the immaterial soul.
↑ 55. This analogy is adapted from Moreland, The Soul: How We Know It’s Real and Why It Matters (Chicago: Moody Press, 2014), chap. 2.
↑ 56. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chap. 8, “Dualism and Modern Science.” Cooper cites both Wilder Penfield and Sir John Eccles as highly respected neuroscientists who favored dualism.
↑ 57. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chap. 8. Cooper notes that quantum indeterminacy provides theoretical space for mental causation to influence brain states without violating physical laws. See also J. P. Moreland, The Soul, chap. 6.
↑ 58. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chap. 8. Cooper notes that his argument for the intermediate state is compatible with Thomistic, Cartesian, emergent, and other forms of substance dualism. See also Joshua R. Farris, “Substance Dualism,” in The Soul of Theological Anthropology, chap. 2.
↑ 59. This point echoes Cooper’s observation that the doctrine of the intermediate state “is not derived from experience or philosophical reflection. It is revealed in the Bible.” Cooper, “Absent from the Body,” in Christian Physicalism?, chap. 16.
↑ 60. Charles Taliaferro, “Physicalism and Sin,” in Christian Physicalism?, chap. 17; Jonathan Loose, “Constitution and the Falling Elevator,” Philosophia Christi 14, no. 2 (2012): 439–449; Howard Robinson, “Reflections on Christian Physicalism by a Veteran Antiphysicalist,” in Christian Physicalism?, chap. 20.
↑ 61. James T. Turner Jr., “How to Lose the Intermediate State without Losing Your Soul,” in Christian Physicalism?, chap. 14; Luke Van Horn, “Merricks’s Soulless Savior,” Faith and Philosophy 27, no. 3 (July 2010): 330–341; Oliver Crisp, “Materialist Christology,” in God Incarnate: Explorations in Christology (London: T&T Clark, 2009), 141.