Chapter 8
Dualism, Physicalism, and the Conditional Immortality Movement:
Why the Soul Matters for Postmortem Hope

Introduction: A Quiet Revolution with Enormous Consequences

Something remarkable has been happening within the conditional immortality movement over the past few decades, and most people in the pews have not even noticed it. Alongside the growing evangelical acceptance of annihilationism—the belief that the unsaved will ultimately be destroyed rather than tormented forever—a quieter revolution has been taking place: a significant number of conditionalist scholars have been abandoning the traditional Christian belief in an immaterial soul. They have embraced, in its place, some form of physicalism—the view that human beings are entirely physical creatures, with no immaterial soul or spirit that survives the death of the body.¹

At first glance, this might seem like an in-house philosophical debate with little practical significance. Who cares whether conditionalists are dualists or physicalists, as long as they agree on the final outcome—that the unsaved will be destroyed rather than tormented forever? But I want to argue in this chapter that this debate is far from academic. It has enormous consequences for one of the most important questions in all of Christian theology: whether God continues to pursue the unsaved after death.

Here is the problem in a nutshell. If physicalism is true—if there is no immaterial soul—then when a person dies, that person ceases to exist. Completely. There is no conscious spirit that survives. There is no "person" in Hades who could encounter God, hear the gospel, and respond in faith. There is nothing at all until God re-creates the person at the future resurrection. And if there is no one there between death and resurrection, then the entire framework of postmortem opportunity collapses. The dead cannot encounter a God they do not exist to encounter.²

This chapter argues that the growing influence of physicalism within the conditional immortality movement threatens the theological coherence of postmortem opportunity, and that substance dualism—supported by both biblical evidence and the empirical data from veridical near-death experiences—provides the necessary metaphysical foundation that physicalist conditionalism simply cannot offer. I believe conditionalists have every reason to embrace dualism, and I want to show why.

To be clear about what this chapter is and is not doing: the full biblical case for substance dualism was presented in Chapter 6, and the full philosophical case (along with responses to physicalist objections) was presented in Chapter 7. The empirical evidence from near-death experiences was detailed in Chapter 5. I will not be repeating those arguments at length here. Instead, this chapter focuses specifically on the intersection of the dualism-physicalism debate with the conditional immortality movement, and on why the choice between these two views of human nature has direct and devastating implications for whether we can affirm a postmortem opportunity for the unsaved.

The Rise of Physicalism within Evangelical Conditionalism

To understand how we got here, we need to step back and look at a broader trend in evangelical theology. For most of Christian history, the vast majority of Christian thinkers—Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant alike—affirmed that human beings are composed of both a material body and an immaterial soul or spirit. This view is called substance dualism. The soul was understood to be a real, non-physical entity created by God, capable of surviving the death of the body and continuing to exist in a conscious state until the resurrection.³

In the twentieth century, however, a growing number of Christian scholars began to question this traditional view. Influenced partly by developments in neuroscience—which increasingly demonstrated the brain's role in generating conscious experience—and partly by a re-reading of the Old Testament that emphasized the holistic, unified nature of the human person, some evangelical theologians began to argue that the Bible does not actually teach the existence of a separable, immaterial soul.

The most influential advocates of this "Christian physicalism" include Nancey Murphy, a philosopher of science at Fuller Theological Seminary, who has argued in works like Bodies and Souls, or Spirited Bodies? that the biblical concept of the person is fundamentally physicalist and that the soul language in Scripture refers to the whole person, not to a separable immaterial substance.⁴ Joel Green, a New Testament scholar, has argued in Body, Soul, and Human Life that the New Testament does not teach a body-soul dualism in the Greek philosophical sense, and that the biblical writers understood human beings as psychosomatic unities—whole persons whose identity is tied to their embodied existence.⁵ Warren Brown, a neuropsychologist, has collaborated with Murphy on the concept of "nonreductive physicalism," which holds that while human beings are entirely physical, the higher-level properties of personhood, consciousness, and moral agency "emerge" from but are not reducible to lower-level brain processes.⁶

What makes this trend especially significant for our purposes is that many of the scholars who have embraced some form of Christian physicalism are also conditionalists—or at the very least, their physicalist anthropology has been adopted enthusiastically by conditionalist thinkers. The connection is not hard to see. If there is no immaterial soul, then there is nothing about a human being that naturally survives the death of the body. At death, the person simply ceases to exist. This seems to provide a ready-made metaphysical foundation for annihilationism: the unsaved are destroyed because, without God's gift of resurrection and immortality, there is simply nothing left of them to persist.

Why Physicalism Appeals to Some Conditionalists

Before I argue against the physicalist turn within conditionalism, I want to be fair to those who have taken it. Good scholars do not adopt positions without reasons, and the physicalist conditionalists have several considerations in their favor—or at least, several considerations that make physicalism seem attractive to them. We should understand these before we respond.

First, physicalism appears to solve the so-called "interaction problem" that has plagued substance dualism since Descartes. If the soul is an entirely different kind of substance from the body—immaterial rather than material—then how do these two radically different substances interact? How does an immaterial thought cause a material arm to move? How does a physical stimulus in the brain produce an immaterial experience of pain? Descartes famously suggested the pineal gland as the point of interaction, but no one found that answer satisfying, and the problem has remained a thorn in the side of dualists ever since.⁷ Physicalism eliminates this problem entirely: if everything is physical, then all causation is physical causation, and there is no mysterious interaction between different kinds of substances to explain. For some conditionalists, this philosophical tidiness is appealing.

Second, physicalism appears to align well with certain readings of Old Testament anthropology. The Hebrew word nephesh (נֶפֶשׁ), often translated "soul" in English Bibles, does not always refer to a separable immaterial entity. In many Old Testament contexts, nephesh means something closer to "living being," "person," or even "throat" and "appetite." When Genesis 2:7 says that God formed the man from dust and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life so that the man "became a living creature" (nephesh chayyah, נֶפֶשׁ חַיָּה), physicalist interpreters read this as describing the animation of a whole person, not the insertion of an immaterial soul into a material body.⁸ Joel Green argues that the Hebrew Bible presents human beings as fundamentally unified creatures whose identity is bound up with their bodily existence. On this reading, the dualistic language that Christians often import into the Old Testament is really a later Greek philosophical overlay, not something the original Hebrew authors intended.⁹

Third—and this is perhaps the most powerful attraction—physicalism seems to support annihilationism in a very natural and elegant way. If there is no immaterial soul that naturally survives death, then the destruction of the body is the destruction of the person. Period. There is no lingering soul to deal with, no intermediate state to theologize about, no awkward questions about what the soul is doing between death and resurrection. The person dies, the person ceases to exist, and unless God raises them at the resurrection, they remain nonexistent. For conditionalists who want a clean, straightforward metaphysical basis for their eschatology, physicalism delivers it beautifully.¹⁰

There is also a fourth reason that operates more at the level of instinct than argument. For many conditionalists, especially those who came to annihilationism by wrestling deeply with the problem of eternal conscious torment, there is a strong pull toward any position that seems to support a "clean break" at death. Eternal torment is horrifying precisely because it implies an ongoing consciousness that never ends. Physicalism offers the opposite: at death, there is simply nothing. No pain, no awareness, no torment of any kind. For those who have agonized over the traditional view of hell, the sheer absence of consciousness that physicalism offers can feel like a theological and emotional relief. It is not a positive argument for physicalism so much as a negative reaction against the implications of ongoing consciousness after death—a reaction that, understandably but mistakenly, leads some conditionalists to throw out the baby (the intermediate state) with the bathwater (eternal conscious torment).⁵⁵

I understand the appeal of each of these considerations. I truly do. But I believe they come at a cost that most conditionalists have not fully reckoned with—a cost that becomes devastating when we ask whether God's saving purposes extend beyond the grave.

The Devastating Problem: Physicalism Destroys the Intermediate State

Now we come to the heart of the matter. If physicalism is true, what happens to a person at the moment of death?

The answer, on consistent physicalist grounds, is stark: the person ceases to exist. There is no soul to depart from the body. There is no spirit to commend into God's hands. There is no conscious "self" that transitions from one state of existence to another. The person is their body, and when the body dies, the person is gone. The lights go out. The story is over—at least until the eschatological resurrection, when God will (somehow) re-create the person from nothing.¹¹

Think about what this means for the question of postmortem opportunity. The entire framework I have been building in this book rests on a simple but essential foundation: that the human person survives death in a conscious state and is therefore capable of encountering God, hearing the gospel, understanding it, and responding to it in the period between physical death and the final resurrection. This is what we have called the intermediate state—the state of the disembodied soul in Hades (for the unsaved) or paradise (for the saved), awaiting the resurrection of the body.

Physicalism obliterates this foundation entirely. If there is no soul, there is no intermediate state. If there is no intermediate state, there is no one "there" between death and resurrection. And if there is no one there, then the postmortem encounter with God that is central to our thesis simply cannot happen.

Consider the implications one by one.

First, the encounter during the dying process. As we discussed in Chapter 10 (on Ladislaus Boros's final decision hypothesis), there are strong philosophical and empirical reasons to believe that the moment of death is a moment of heightened spiritual awareness—a moment when the dying person encounters God in a profoundly personal way and is given the opportunity to respond in faith. Boros argued, drawing on Thomistic philosophy, that death is the moment when the soul achieves its fullest self-possession and its most complete openness to ultimate reality.¹² Near-death experience research, as we saw in Chapter 5, provides striking empirical support for this hypothesis: people who come close to death frequently report encountering a being of overwhelming love and light, experiencing a comprehensive life review, and undergoing a profound transformation of consciousness.¹³ But if physicalism is true, there is no "soul" to achieve self-possession. There is no immaterial consciousness to experience heightened awareness. As the brain shuts down, consciousness simply dissolves. The dying person does not encounter God—they encounter nothing, because they are ceasing to exist.

Second, the intermediate state in Hades. The biblical picture, as we demonstrated in Chapter 6, is that the unsaved dead are in Hades—a conscious waiting state between death and the final judgment. The rich man in Hades (Luke 16:19–31) is conscious, remembering his earthly life, feeling distress, reasoning, communicating, and expressing desires. The souls under the altar in Revelation 6:9–11 are aware of earthly events, emotionally engaged, and making requests of God. Samuel, summoned at Endor (1 Samuel 28), is aware of current events and communicates coherently. If these portrayals have any basis in reality—and I believe they do—then the intermediate state is a place of genuine conscious experience, where God's love and grace can continue to reach and draw the unsaved.¹⁴ But on physicalism, none of this is possible. There are no conscious souls in Hades. There is no Hades at all—at least not as a place inhabited by conscious persons. There is only the gap of nonexistence between the death of the body and the eschatological resurrection.

Third, the ongoing salvific pursuit of God after death. One of the central arguments of this book is that God's love does not stop at the grave. The God who desires all people to be saved (1 Timothy 2:4), who is not willing that any should perish (2 Peter 3:9), who pursues the lost sheep until He finds it (Luke 15:4)—this God does not simply abandon the unsaved dead. He continues to love them, draw them, and offer them the opportunity to respond to His grace (see Chapter 2). But this ongoing pursuit requires someone to be pursued. You cannot love a person who does not exist. You cannot draw someone who is not there. Physicalism turns the billions of unsaved dead into nothing—not persons in need of God's grace, but empty gaps in existence, waiting to be filled at the resurrection.¹⁵

Fourth, the connection between Christ's descent and postmortem proclamation. As we will argue in detail in Chapters 11 and 12, one of the strongest biblical supports for postmortem opportunity is the teaching of 1 Peter 3:18–4:6, where we read that Christ "went and proclaimed to the spirits in prison" (3:19) and that "the gospel was preached even to those who are dead" (4:6). The most natural reading of this passage—and the reading held by the vast majority of the early church fathers—is that Christ descended to Hades between His death and resurrection and proclaimed the gospel to the human dead who were there. But notice: this passage only makes sense if there are conscious dead persons in Hades to hear the proclamation. If physicalism is true and the dead are simply nonexistent, then there is no one in the "prison" for Christ to visit. There are no "dead" to preach the gospel to. The entire 1 Peter 3–4 passage loses its force—and with it, one of the most important biblical texts supporting postmortem opportunity.⁵⁶

Fifth, consider the experiential dimension of encountering God. Throughout this book, I have argued that the postmortem encounter is not a mere intellectual transaction—not simply God transmitting information and the person deciding to accept or reject it—but a deeply personal, relational experience. The unsaved soul encounters the living Christ, experiences the overwhelming reality of His love, feels the weight of a comprehensive life review in which the effects of their actions on others are made known, and responds from the depths of their being. This kind of encounter requires a conscious, experiencing subject. It requires someone who can feel, reflect, remember, and choose. Physicalism leaves no such subject between death and resurrection. The richness and depth of the postmortem encounter that we have described—an encounter consistent with both Boros's philosophical hypothesis and the empirical evidence from NDEs—simply cannot occur if the person does not exist.⁵⁷

The Replica Problem: Is the Resurrected Person Really "You"?

The problems with physicalist conditionalism do not end with the loss of the intermediate state. There is another difficulty that strikes at the heart of personal identity itself, and it is one that physicalist theologians have struggled mightily—and, I believe, unsuccessfully—to resolve.

If physicalism is true, and a person ceases to exist entirely at death, then what happens at the resurrection? God must, in some sense, re-create the person from scratch. The original body has decomposed (or been cremated, or scattered across the ocean floor). There is no soul that has persisted through the interval of death, carrying the person's identity with it. God must bring into existence a new body—perhaps one that is qualitatively similar to the original, perhaps one that shares the same pattern of information—and this new body must somehow be the same person who died.¹⁶

But is it? This is what philosophers call the "replica problem," and it is devastating for physicalist accounts of the resurrection. If I cease to exist entirely at death, and God later creates a new person who has all of my memories, all of my personality traits, and even all of my physical characteristics, is that person me? Or is that person a very convincing copy—a replica who thinks she is me but is, in fact, a different person altogether?¹⁷

Consider an analogy. Imagine that you walk into a Star Trek–style transporter. The transporter scans every atom in your body, transmits the information to a distant location, and uses that information to assemble an exact physical duplicate at the destination. Meanwhile, the original body at the departure point is destroyed. The person who steps off the transporter pad at the destination has all of your memories, all of your personality, all of your physical features. She believes she is you. But is she? Or did you die in the transporter, and is the person at the destination merely a copy?

Now make the analogy even more troubling. Imagine that the transporter malfunctions and fails to destroy the original body. Now there are two of you—the original and the copy. They are both physically identical. They both have the same memories. They both believe they are "the real you." But they cannot both be you, because they are two distinct persons occupying two distinct locations. This thought experiment reveals something important: being qualitatively identical to someone (having the same properties) is not the same as being numerically identical to them (being the very same person). The copy is qualitatively identical to the original, but she is not numerically identical—she is a different person.¹⁸

This is precisely the problem that faces physicalist accounts of the resurrection. If I cease to exist entirely at death, and God creates a new person at the resurrection who is qualitatively identical to me, there is no guarantee—indeed, no clear metaphysical basis—for the claim that this new person is numerically identical to me. She is a replica, not a continuation. And if she is a replica, then "I" was not actually raised from the dead. A copy of me was created, and the real me remains forever gone.

Nancey Murphy and other Christian physicalists have attempted to address this problem in various ways. Some appeal to God's faithfulness: God would not create a mere replica; God intends to raise the same person, and divine intention is sufficient to guarantee personal identity.¹⁹ Others appeal to patterns of information: if God preserves and re-instantiates the exact pattern of information that constituted the original person, then the resurrected person really is the same person.²⁰ Still others appeal to various forms of material continuity—perhaps God preserves some kernel of matter from the original body that provides a physical link between the pre-death and post-resurrection person.

I find none of these responses convincing. The appeal to divine intention is essentially an appeal to miracle—God just makes it be so—which is not so much solving the philosophical problem as declaring it irrelevant. The appeal to information patterns fails because, as the transporter thought experiment shows, sharing the same pattern of information does not guarantee numerical identity. And the appeal to material continuity faces the obvious problem that the original body has decomposed, been consumed by other organisms, and had its atoms scattered across the earth over the course of centuries.²¹

Substance dualism, by contrast, solves the replica problem elegantly. If the soul is a real, immaterial substance that survives the death of the body, then personal identity is carried through death by the persisting soul. The person who dies and the person who is raised are the same person because they have the same soul. The soul provides the metaphysical "thread" of continuity that links the pre-death person to the resurrected person. There is no gap in existence, no moment of nonbeing, and therefore no replica problem.²²

This matters enormously for postmortem opportunity. If the person who is raised at the final judgment is not truly the same person who died—if she is merely a replica—then there is a deep sense in which the person who died without hearing the gospel never receives a chance to respond. The replica receives the chance, but the original person is gone. On the other hand, if the soul survives death and maintains continuity of personal identity, then the person who encounters God in the intermediate state and at the final judgment really is the same person who lived and died on earth. The postmortem opportunity is genuine because it is extended to the very same person who needed it.

Veridical Near-Death Experiences: An Empirical Challenge to Physicalist Conditionalism

Up to this point, our argument against physicalist conditionalism has been primarily philosophical and theological. But there is another line of evidence that I believe is uniquely powerful—and it is one that most participants in the conditionalist debate have not yet reckoned with. I am speaking of veridical near-death experiences.

As I detailed extensively in Chapter 5, the last several decades have produced a remarkable body of research into near-death experiences (NDEs)—experiences reported by people who come close to death or are clinically dead for a period of time before being resuscitated. The core features of these experiences are well documented: an out-of-body experience, passage through a tunnel, encounter with a being of overwhelming light and love, a comprehensive life review, meeting deceased relatives, and a border or point of no return beyond which the person cannot go and still return to their body.²³

What makes certain NDEs especially significant for our argument is the phenomenon of veridical perception—cases where NDErs report accurate observations of events occurring at a distance from their physical body, events they could not have perceived through any normal sensory means. Patients have accurately described conversations in hospital waiting rooms they were not in. Patients have identified specific objects placed on top of high shelves that were invisible from the operating table. Blind patients—including the well-documented case of Vicki Umipeg, who had been blind from birth—have reported visual perceptions during their NDEs that were later verified as accurate.²⁴ The AWARE study led by Sam Parnia and other rigorous scientific investigations have added further evidence that consciousness can, in at least some cases, function independently of measurable brain activity.²⁵

Let me highlight why the case of congenitally blind NDErs is so devastating for physicalism. Vicki Umipeg was born blind—she had never had a visual experience in her entire life. Her visual cortex had never processed visual information. Yet during her NDE, she reported seeing the operating room, her own body on the table, and specific details that were later confirmed by medical staff. On physicalist terms, this is inexplicable. If visual consciousness is produced by the visual cortex, and the visual cortex has never functioned in this patient, then visual experience should be impossible—full stop. There is no neural substrate to generate the experience. And yet the experience occurred, and it was accurate. Kenneth Ring and Sharon Cooper documented multiple cases of blind NDErs who reported veridical visual perceptions, and no physicalist explanation has been able to account for these cases. The oxygen deprivation hypothesis cannot explain them—oxygen deprivation does not give sight to the congenitally blind. The temporal lobe stimulation hypothesis cannot explain them—temporal lobe activity does not generate visual experiences in persons whose visual cortex has never processed visual data. The residual brain activity hypothesis cannot explain them—residual brain activity in a visual cortex that has never functioned cannot produce visual perceptions.⁶²

Now, here is why this matters so much for the debate within conditionalism. The central claim of physicalism is that consciousness is identical to, or entirely produced by, brain activity. On a physicalist view, when the brain ceases to function—as it does in cardiac arrest—consciousness should cease as well. There should be no experience at all, much less the vivid, coherent, and verifiable experiences reported by NDErs. Yet the evidence suggests that consciousness continues—and not merely in a degraded, hallucinatory form, but in a form that is often described as more vivid, more coherent, and more "real" than ordinary waking experience.²⁶

Veridical NDEs are precisely what substance dualism predicts. If the soul is a real, immaterial substance that is not identical to the brain, then we would expect that the soul could continue to function even when the brain is not functioning. We would expect that the soul's perception would not be limited by the body's sensory organs. We would expect exactly the kind of evidence that veridical NDE research has produced. On the other hand, veridical NDEs are precisely what physicalism cannot explain. If consciousness is nothing more than brain activity, then accurate perception during a period of no measurable brain activity is simply impossible—and yet it occurs.²⁷

I have addressed the standard physicalist explanations for NDEs in Chapter 5—the hallucination hypothesis, the oxygen deprivation theory, temporal lobe stimulation, the DMT hypothesis, and the residual brain activity hypothesis—and shown why each of them fails to account for the veridical elements of NDEs. I will not repeat those arguments here. But I want to emphasize the specific relevance of this evidence for the conditionalist debate: if veridical NDEs demonstrate that consciousness can function apart from the brain, then physicalism is empirically falsified. And if physicalism is empirically falsified, then conditionalists who have adopted it need to find a different metaphysical foundation for their eschatology.²⁸

This is where my own research as a Th.D. candidate becomes directly relevant. My doctoral dissertation examines veridical near-death experiences as evidence for substance dualism, and I believe this research has profound implications for the conditionalist movement. If the NDE evidence holds up—and I am convinced that it does—then we have empirical, not merely philosophical or theological, grounds for affirming that the soul survives the death of the body. This is not just an abstract philosophical argument about the nature of consciousness. It is evidence—hard, documented, peer-reviewed evidence—that human beings are more than their brains, more than their bodies, and that something about us persists beyond the death of the physical organism.²⁹

A Faulty Assumption: Does Conditional Immortality Require Physicalism?

Before we address the positive case for dualistic conditionalism, we need to deal with a specific variant of Christian physicalism that deserves special attention: nonreductive physicalism, the view championed by Murphy and Brown. Nonreductive physicalism is, in some ways, the most sophisticated version of Christian physicalism currently on offer, and it is the version most likely to appeal to thoughtful conditionalists who are uncomfortable with crude reductive materialism but still want to avoid traditional dualism.

The central claim of nonreductive physicalism is that human beings are entirely physical—there is no immaterial soul—but that the higher-level properties of human experience (consciousness, moral reasoning, spiritual awareness, personhood) are not reducible to lower-level brain processes. These higher properties "emerge" from the physical substrate in a way that is genuinely novel and causally significant. Murphy likes to use the analogy of water: individual hydrogen and oxygen molecules do not have the property of being "wet," but when you combine them in the right way, wetness emerges as a genuine property of the whole. Similarly, she argues, individual neurons do not have the property of consciousness, but when organized in the right way, consciousness emerges as a genuine property of the whole brain.⁶⁰

The appeal of this view is understandable. It seems to honor the reality of conscious experience, moral agency, and spiritual life without invoking an immaterial soul. It allows the Christian physicalist to say things like "persons are more than the sum of their parts" without committing to dualism. But there are deep problems with nonreductive physicalism that become apparent when we press on its implications for survival after death.

The fundamental problem is this: if consciousness and personhood are emergent properties of a physical brain, then they depend entirely on that physical brain for their existence. When the brain ceases to function, the emergent properties cease as well—just as wetness ceases when you separate the hydrogen and oxygen. There is no emergent property "floating free" of its physical substrate. The wetness does not survive the dissolution of the water molecules. And on nonreductive physicalism, consciousness does not survive the death of the brain. Murphy acknowledges this explicitly. The hope for the Christian, on her view, is not the survival of an immaterial soul but the promise of future resurrection—God's eschatological act of re-creating the person.⁶¹

But this brings us right back to the problems we have already identified: the elimination of the intermediate state and the replica problem. Nonreductive physicalism may be a more sophisticated version of physicalism than crude reductionism, but when it comes to the question of survival after death—which is the question that matters most for our purposes—it arrives at exactly the same place. The person ceases to exist at death. There is no one "there" between death and resurrection. The postmortem opportunity is impossible.

One of the most common errors in the contemporary conditionalist movement is the assumption that conditional immortality requires—or at least strongly favors—a physicalist anthropology. The reasoning goes something like this: if the soul is immaterial and naturally immortal (as Plato taught), then it cannot be destroyed, and annihilationism is impossible. Therefore, to maintain that the unsaved are ultimately destroyed, we need to deny the existence of an immaterial soul. Physicalism provides this denial, and so physicalism is the natural partner for conditionalism.

But this reasoning contains a crucial error. It confuses the existence of the soul with the inherent immortality of the soul. These are two very different claims. Substance dualism says the soul is a real, immaterial substance. Platonic immortality says the soul is by nature indestructible. You can affirm the first without affirming the second.³⁰

Think about it this way. God creates all things, including immaterial souls. If God creates souls, then He can also determine the conditions under which they continue to exist. There is no logical reason why an immaterial soul must be inherently immortal. God could create souls that are naturally mortal—souls that exist only as long as God sustains them in existence. If God withdraws His sustaining power, the soul ceases to exist, just as a candle flame ceases to exist when the oxygen is removed. The soul's existence depends on God's ongoing creative and sustaining activity, not on some built-in indestructibility.³¹

This is, in fact, a very traditional Christian view. Thomas Aquinas himself, one of the greatest defenders of the soul's immateriality, acknowledged that the soul's continued existence after death depends on God's sustaining will. The soul is not self-existent. It does not have existence in and of itself, as God does. It has existence as a gift from God, and what God gives, God can also withdraw.³² R. Zachary Manis makes a similar point in his discussion of annihilationism: it is perfectly coherent to hold that the soul exists as an immaterial substance while also holding that God has the power to bring it to nothing simply by ceasing to sustain it in existence.³³

The conditionalist claim is that immortality is not inherent to human nature but is a gift of God, given to those who receive eternal life through faith in Christ. Romans 6:23 says, "The wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord." Eternal life—genuine, unending existence in the presence of God—is something God gives. It is not something we already possess by nature. This is perfectly compatible with substance dualism. The soul exists after death (dualism), but it does not exist forever unless God grants it the gift of immortality (conditionalism). Those who receive this gift through faith in Christ live forever. Those who finally reject Christ are not sustained by God and cease to exist—body and soul.³⁴

Jesus Himself seems to affirm exactly this when He says, "Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell [Gehenna]" (Matthew 10:28, ESV). Notice what Jesus says here. Human beings cannot destroy the soul—which implies that the soul survives the death of the body (dualism). But God can destroy both soul and body in Gehenna—which implies that the soul is not inherently indestructible (conditionalism). Both truths are present in a single verse. The soul exists as a real, immaterial entity that survives bodily death, but its ultimate survival depends on God's sovereign decision.³⁵

The Best of Both Worlds: Substance Dualism Plus Conditional Immortality

What I am proposing, then, is a framework that combines the strengths of substance dualism with the strengths of conditional immortality, while avoiding the devastating weaknesses of physicalism. Let me lay out how this integrated framework works.

First, the soul survives death. When a person dies, the immaterial soul separates from the body and continues to exist in a conscious state. This is consistent with the biblical evidence surveyed in Chapter 6: Rachel's nephesh departing at death (Genesis 35:18), the spirit returning to God (Ecclesiastes 12:7), Jesus committing His spirit to the Father (Luke 23:46), Stephen committing his spirit to Jesus (Acts 7:59), Paul's desire to depart and be with Christ (Philippians 1:21–23), the souls under the altar crying out to God (Revelation 6:9–11), and the clear teaching of Jesus that the soul survives the death of the body (Matthew 10:28).³⁶

Second, the soul is conscious in the intermediate state. The saved are with Christ in paradise (Luke 23:43; Philippians 1:23; 2 Corinthians 5:8). The unsaved are in Hades, which is a conscious waiting state—not the final Hell (Gehenna) or the Lake of Fire, but a holding place where the unsaved dead await the final judgment (see Chapter 21 for the full taxonomy). The intermediate state is a real period of genuine conscious experience, as the biblical texts consistently portray.³⁷

Third, the conscious intermediate state makes postmortem opportunity possible. Because the soul survives death and retains its capacities for cognition, experience, and volition, the unsaved dead in Hades can encounter God, hear the gospel, and respond in faith. As we argued in Chapter 2, the God who desires all people to be saved and who pursues the lost with relentless love does not abandon the unsaved at the grave. He continues to pursue them. And because the soul is conscious and capable of responding, this pursuit is not in vain—it can actually reach the person and elicit a genuine response.³⁸

Fourth, immortality is conditional. The soul's survival after death does not mean the soul is inherently indestructible. Immortality—unending life in the presence of God—is a gift given to those who receive Christ, whether in this life or during the postmortem opportunity. Those who receive this gift will be raised in glorified bodies and will live forever with God. But those who finally and irrevocably reject Christ, even after the fullest possible encounter with God's love, will not receive this gift. God, who has been sustaining their souls in existence, will withdraw that sustaining power, and they will cease to exist—body and soul. This is the annihilation that conditionalism affirms, but it happens after the person has been given every possible opportunity to respond to God's grace.³⁹

Fifth, the destruction of the unsaved is not God's desire but God's reluctant acknowledgment of their free choice. As I argued in Chapter 2 and will develop further in Chapters 23 and 23A, the Lake of Fire is best understood as God's full, unfiltered presence and love. For the saved, this presence is experienced as glory and joy—it is Heaven. For the unsaved who continue to reject Christ, this same presence is experienced as agonizing torment, because they hate God and cannot bear the weight of His love. God's fire purifies by destroying the evil within each person. For those who repent, the purification leads to salvation. For those who refuse to repent, the purification consumes everything that is evil until there is nothing left. This is the annihilation—not a vindictive act of divine destruction, but the natural consequence of being in the presence of infinite holiness while clinging to sin.⁴⁰

Notice how this picture depends entirely on the soul's survival after death. The purifying encounter with God in the Lake of Fire—described in Revelation 20–21 and illuminated by the Eastern Orthodox "river of fire" tradition (see Chapter 23C)—requires a conscious person standing before God, experiencing His love, and making a response. On the physicalist view, the person who stands before God at the final judgment has only just been re-created. She has no history of postmortem encounter with God. She has not experienced God's love in Hades, has not undergone any process of spiritual maturation or wrestling with divine grace, and has not had the extended opportunity for repentance that the intermediate state provides. She is, in effect, the same person who died—no more prepared for this final encounter than she was at the moment of death. But on the dualist view, the person who stands before God at the final judgment has already been in God's presence for the entire duration of the intermediate state. She has had time—perhaps what seems like years or decades in the spiritual realm—to experience God's love, to reflect on her life, to wrestle with the truth, and to soften toward the God who has been pursuing her. The final judgment is not her first encounter with God; it is the culmination of a long process of divine pursuit. This picture makes far more sense of God's patience and fairness than the physicalist alternative.

This integrated framework—substance dualism plus conditional immortality plus postmortem opportunity—preserves everything that is best in both the dualist and the conditionalist traditions. From dualism, it preserves the conscious intermediate state, the continuity of personal identity through death, and the possibility of genuine postmortem encounter with God. From conditionalism, it preserves the insistence that immortality is a gift rather than a natural right, the biblical emphasis on the finality of "destruction" and "death" language for the unsaved, and the moral intuition that infinite punishment for finite sin is unjust. And it adds the dimension of postmortem opportunity, which ensures that every single person who has ever lived will receive a genuine, meaningful encounter with the living God—whether in this life, during the dying process, in the intermediate state, or at the final judgment.⁴¹

Diversity within the Conditionalist Movement: Not All Conditionalists Are Physicalists

It is important to recognize that the conditional immortality movement is not monolithic. While some conditionalists have embraced physicalism, others have explicitly affirmed substance dualism—or at the very least, have not committed themselves to physicalism. The physicalist turn, while influential, is not universal within the movement, and there are significant conditionalist voices who provide a foundation for the kind of dualistic conditionalism I am advocating here.

Edward Fudge, whose landmark work The Fire That Consumes is widely regarded as the most important modern defense of conditionalism, does not commit himself to physicalism. Fudge's argument for annihilationism is primarily exegetical—based on the biblical language of "destruction," "death," "perishing," and the consuming nature of fire—rather than metaphysical. He does not argue that annihilationism is true because there is no soul; he argues that it is true because the Bible teaches that the unsaved will be destroyed, whatever the metaphysical mechanism of that destruction might be. His case is compatible with either a physicalist or a dualist anthropology.⁴² This is a crucial point. The most influential conditionalist of the modern era built his entire case without needing to deny the existence of the soul. If Fudge's exegetical arguments succeed—and I believe they do, though I wish he had engaged more seriously with the universalist case—they succeed whether or not physicalism is true. Conditionalists who feel drawn to physicalism because they think their eschatology requires it should take note: the founder of the modern conditionalist revival did not think so.

John Stott, the influential evangelical leader who famously expressed his tentative acceptance of annihilationism in his dialogue with David Edwards, also did not base his conditionalism on a denial of the soul. Stott's concern was with the justice of God—he found eternal conscious torment to be morally troubling—not with the metaphysics of human nature. Nothing in Stott's argument requires or implies physicalism. Indeed, Stott's broader theological commitments—his affirmation of historic Christian orthodoxy, his reverence for the creeds, his robust supernaturalism—sit much more comfortably with substance dualism than with any form of physicalism.⁴³

Clark Pinnock, another prominent conditionalist, similarly argued for annihilationism on moral and exegetical grounds rather than on physicalist metaphysics. Pinnock was concerned with the character of God—could a loving God really torment people forever?—and with the plain sense of the biblical "destruction" language. Like Fudge and Stott, his case does not depend on denying the existence of the soul.⁴⁴

Even among the scholars at the forefront of the modern conditionalist revival—the contributors to Rethinking Hell, for instance—there is no consensus that physicalism is necessary for conditionalism. Some contributors assume a physicalist anthropology; others do not. The movement's core claim—that immortality is conditional, not inherent, and that the unsaved will ultimately cease to exist—is a claim about eschatology, not about anthropology. And as I have argued above, this eschatological claim is perfectly compatible with substance dualism.⁴⁵

All of this means that conditionalists who are concerned about the implications of physicalism—and I hope this chapter is convincing them that they should be concerned—do not need to abandon their conditionalism. They simply need to recognize that the metaphysical framework most naturally associated with conditionalism is not physicalism but substance dualism with conditional immortality. The soul exists, the soul survives death, but the soul's eternal continuation depends on God's gift of life through Christ.

Responding to the Physicalist Arguments: A Brief Review

I addressed the physicalist arguments for Christian physicalism in detail in Chapter 7. Here I want to briefly revisit the three main reasons physicalism appeals to conditionalists and show why each of them fails to justify the physicalist turn.

The Interaction Problem

Yes, the interaction problem is a genuine philosophical difficulty for substance dualism. If the soul is immaterial and the body is material, how do they causally interact? How does a non-physical thought produce a physical movement? This question has troubled dualists since Descartes, and it would be dishonest to pretend it has been fully resolved. But as I argued in Chapter 7, it is no more of a difficulty than the problems that face physicalism. The "hard problem of consciousness"—explaining how purely physical brain processes give rise to subjective conscious experience—is, if anything, more intractable than the interaction problem. At least dualism acknowledges that consciousness is a different kind of reality from physical matter. Physicalism must explain how consciousness arises from matter alone, and after decades of trying, no one has come close to solving this problem.⁴⁶

Moreover, we have direct, first-person experience of mental causation. Every time you decide to raise your arm and your arm goes up, you are experiencing the causal interaction of mind and body. This experience may be philosophically puzzling, but it is undeniable. As J.P. Moreland and others have argued, the fact that we cannot fully explain how mind-body interaction works does not mean it does not happen—it means our philosophical theories have not yet caught up with our experience. Science routinely acknowledges causal connections before it can explain the mechanism. Gravity was an undeniable reality long before Einstein explained its mechanism through the curvature of spacetime. The same is true of mind-body interaction: we know it happens; we are still working out the details of how.⁴⁷

The Old Testament Anthropology Argument

The claim that the Old Testament teaches a purely physicalist anthropology does not withstand careful scrutiny. While it is true that the Hebrew word nephesh does not always refer to a separable soul, there are clear Old Testament texts that presuppose the soul's separability from the body. Genesis 35:18 describes Rachel's nephesh "departing" at death. First Kings 17:21–22 describes the nephesh of the widow's son returning to him when Elijah prays for his restoration. Ecclesiastes 12:7 explicitly distinguishes the body (dust returning to the earth) from the spirit (ruach, רוּחַ) that returns to God. These texts are difficult to reconcile with a thoroughgoing physicalism.⁴⁸

Joel Green and other physicalist interpreters tend to handle these texts in one of two ways. Either they argue that the "soul language" is metaphorical—Rachel's nephesh "departing" is just a poetic way of saying she died, not a description of an immaterial entity leaving her body—or they contend that these texts represent a minority strand within Old Testament thinking that should not be taken as dominant. But neither response is convincing. The language of departure in Genesis 35:18 implies the nephesh goes somewhere—it is not merely a metaphor for cessation of life. And the Ecclesiastes 12:7 distinction between the body returning to dust and the spirit returning to God is as clear a statement of body-spirit dualism as one could ask for. The physicalist must explain away these texts, and the explanations tend to feel strained.

More importantly, even if we grant for the sake of argument that the Old Testament is somewhat ambiguous on this question, the New Testament resolves that ambiguity decisively in favor of dualism. Green's suggestion that we should interpret the New Testament through the lens of a physicalist Old Testament anthropology gets the hermeneutical direction exactly backward. Progressive revelation means that later, clearer texts illuminate earlier, less clear ones—not the reverse. And the New Testament is remarkably clear on this matter.

Jesus distinguishes body and soul as destructible and survivable respectively (Matthew 10:28). Paul expects to "depart and be with Christ" immediately after death, before the resurrection (Philippians 1:23). He speaks of being "away from the body and at home with the Lord" (2 Corinthians 5:8). The author of Hebrews refers to "the spirits of the righteous made perfect" (Hebrews 12:23). John sees "the souls of those who had been slain" conscious and speaking beneath the altar (Revelation 6:9–11). As we demonstrated in Chapter 6, the cumulative biblical evidence for a conscious, surviving soul is overwhelming—not from one or two isolated proof-texts, but from a pervasive pattern running from Genesis to Revelation.⁴⁹

The "Elegant Simplicity" Argument

The claim that physicalism provides a cleaner metaphysical basis for annihilationism is true—but "cleaner" is not the same as "better." Physicalism achieves its simplicity by eliminating the intermediate state entirely, and as we have seen, this elimination comes at a devastating cost. It eliminates the possibility of postmortem opportunity. It creates the replica problem for the resurrection. It contradicts the biblical evidence for a conscious intermediate state. And it is empirically falsified by veridical NDE research. A framework that is simple but wrong is not preferable to one that is slightly more complex but correct.⁵⁰

The Pastoral and Theological Stakes

I want to close this chapter by reflecting on what is really at stake in this debate. The choice between physicalism and substance dualism within the conditionalist movement is not merely an academic exercise in philosophical theology. It is a choice with profound pastoral and theological consequences—consequences that affect how we think about the billions of people who have lived and died without ever hearing the name of Jesus Christ.

If physicalism is true, then those billions of unevangelized dead are simply gone. They ceased to exist at the moment of their death. There is no one "there" to encounter God, no person in Hades to hear the gospel, no soul to be drawn by divine love. Their only hope—if we can even call it that—is the eschatological resurrection, at which point God will re-create them (or, as we have argued, create replicas of them) and somehow deal with them then. But even at the resurrection, the physicalist has no clear account of how the re-created person is the same person who died, and no theological framework for the kind of extended, relational encounter with God that I have described in this book.

If substance dualism is true, the picture is radically different. The unsaved dead are not gone. They are in Hades—conscious, aware, capable of thought and feeling and choice. God's love reaches them there. His grace pursues them. The gospel of Christ can be proclaimed to them—as 1 Peter 3:18–4:6 suggests it already has been, at least to some (see Chapters 11–12). They can encounter the living God face to face, experience the overwhelming reality of His love, and respond in faith. Their hope does not depend on a future re-creation event of dubious personal identity. Their hope depends on a God who is present with them now, in the intermediate state, pursuing them with the same relentless love He showed them during their earthly lives.⁵¹

The pastoral implications are immense. Consider the mother who has lost a child—a child who died before reaching the age of understanding, or a grown child who died without faith. On the physicalist view, that child or that adult child is simply nonexistent until the resurrection. There is nothing for the mother to hope for in the interim. But on the dualist view, the child's soul is with God, and the adult child's soul is in a place where God's love continues to reach and draw them. The mother can grieve, yes, but she can also hope—not just for some distant eschatological event, but for a God who is actively pursuing her loved one right now, in the intermediate state, with unfailing love and infinite patience.⁵²

Consider the missionary who arrives in a village to find that the elderly chief has just died—a good man, by all accounts, but one who never heard the gospel. On the physicalist view, that chief is gone. His opportunity for salvation is entirely in the hands of whatever happens at the eschatological resurrection. But on the dualist view, that chief's soul is alive and conscious, and the God who loved him while he was alive continues to love him now. The missionary can trust that God's salvific purposes for that chief did not end at the grave.⁵³

Consider the billions of people throughout human history who lived and died in cultures that had never heard of Jesus of Nazareth—indigenous peoples in remote regions, ancient civilizations that flourished centuries before Christ, peoples cut off from the spread of the gospel by geography, language, or political barriers. On the physicalist view, these billions are simply gone, existing as nothing until the resurrection. On the dualist view, their souls are alive, and the God who desires all people to be saved (1 Timothy 2:4) is present with them, pursuing them, offering them the very encounter with Christ that they never had the opportunity to experience on earth.⁵⁴

There is also a broader theological concern that deserves attention. Physicalism, when adopted by conditionalists, tends to reduce the significance of death itself. If physicalism is true, death is essentially the same as dreamless sleep—or rather, it is nothing at all. The person simply ceases to exist. There is no drama, no encounter, no moment of reckoning. Death becomes a mere biological event, devoid of spiritual significance beyond the bare fact of cessation. But this is not how the Bible portrays death. In Scripture, death is a profound spiritual event—a passage from one mode of existence to another, a moment when the person stands, as it were, at the threshold between the temporal and the eternal. Boros captured this insight beautifully in his "final decision" hypothesis: death is not simply the end of biological function but the moment of the soul's fullest self-realization, the moment when the veils of embodied existence are lifted and the person encounters ultimate reality face to face.⁵⁸ NDE research supports this picture: people who approach the boundary of death consistently report that the experience is intensely meaningful—not empty, not nothing, but overwhelmingly rich in significance, awareness, and encounter. Physicalism strips death of this spiritual depth and reduces it to a mere off-switch.

Finally, consider the question of divine justice. One of the strongest arguments for postmortem opportunity—an argument we develop at length in Chapter 4—is that it is unjust for God to condemn people who never had a genuine opportunity to respond to the gospel. As Beilby argues, if God is truly just and truly desires all to be saved, then He must provide every person with a real, meaningful opportunity to encounter Christ and respond in faith.⁵⁹ But on the physicalist view, this opportunity can only come at the eschatological resurrection—a single moment, after perhaps thousands of years of nonexistence, when the person is re-created and presumably confronted with Christ for the first and only time. This seems like a truncated, inadequate expression of divine justice compared to the dualist picture, in which God pursues the person through the dying process, through the intermediate state, and up to the final judgment—giving them multiple occasions, across an extended period, to encounter His love and respond to it. The dualist framework does far greater justice to the biblical portrait of a God who is patient, long-suffering, and relentless in His pursuit of the lost.

Conclusion: Why the Soul Matters for Postmortem Hope

We have covered a great deal of ground in this chapter, and I want to draw the threads together. The growing influence of physicalism within the conditional immortality movement is, I believe, a serious theological mistake—not because physicalism is an unreasonable philosophical position in the abstract, but because it has consequences that undermine the very heart of the Christian hope for the unevangelized dead.

Physicalism eliminates the conscious intermediate state, making it impossible for the unsaved dead to encounter God between death and resurrection. Physicalism creates the replica problem, casting doubt on whether the resurrected person is truly the same person who died. Physicalism is contradicted by the empirical evidence from veridical near-death experiences, which strongly suggest that consciousness can function independently of the brain. And physicalism conflicts with the clear teaching of Scripture, which consistently portrays the dead as conscious, communicative, and capable of experiencing God's presence.

Conditionalists do not need physicalism. The central claim of conditional immortality—that immortality is a gift from God, not an inherent human property—is perfectly compatible with substance dualism. God can create souls that are real and immaterial but not inherently immortal. The soul survives death (dualism) but does not exist forever unless God grants the gift of eternal life (conditionalism). This framework preserves the biblical intermediate state, avoids the replica problem, is consistent with the NDE evidence, and—most importantly—makes it possible for God's saving love to continue pursuing the unsaved dead in the period between physical death and the final judgment.

I want to address one final concern that some readers may have. Someone might object: "You are asking conditionalists to take on additional philosophical baggage—the immaterial soul—just to support a speculative doctrine of postmortem opportunity. Isn't it simpler to just accept physicalism and live with the consequences?" My answer is twofold. First, as we have seen, the evidence points strongly toward dualism. The biblical evidence, the philosophical arguments, and the empirical NDE data all converge on the conclusion that human beings are more than their bodies. Accepting dualism is not taking on unnecessary baggage—it is following the evidence where it leads. Second, the "consequences" of physicalism for the billions of unevangelized dead are not something we should casually "live with." We are talking about real people—people made in the image of God, people for whom Christ died, people whom God loves with an everlasting love. If there is a way to affirm that God's saving purposes extend beyond the grave—and I believe there is—then we have a moral and theological obligation to explore it, defend it, and proclaim it.

The question of whether the soul survives death is not a philosophical curiosity. It is, for the billions who have died without Christ, quite literally a matter of life and death. If there is no soul, there is no one for God to reach after the grave. But if the soul is real—if we are more than our bodies, more than our brains, more than the sum of our physical parts—then death is not the end of God's pursuit. And that makes all the difference in the world.

In the next chapter, we will build on this foundation by examining the conscious intermediate state in detail—what it is like, what the soul can do there, and how it provides the setting for the postmortem encounter with God that is at the heart of our thesis. The metaphysical framework is in place. Now we need to explore what happens within it.