Does the soul exist?

There are those Christian groups that contend that the soul is not conscious after death, namely the Seventh-day Adventists and Jehovah’s Witnesses, among others. Their position is that you don't have a soul, or nephesh in Hebrew, but that you are a soul, as in Genesis 2:7, when man became a living soul (nephesh). Nephesh, they say, is the living being that is not mortal and does not exist apart from the body. They argue that when the body dies, so does the soul.

However, the nephesh does not preclude existence beyond death. When Scriptures speak of the Nephesh dying, as in Ezekiel 18:4, death does not mean annihilation but separation (from God). Not everything in Scripture is purely physical. Nephesh also applies to animals, but if humans and animals are only their nephesh, then there is nothing that distinguishes or separates humans from animals. Indeed, humans were created in the image of God. So, what does that mean? God is not physical or mortal, so it can't refer to that. It has to refer to His immaterial, eternal attributes. God is the only uncreated being in existence from which all life stems. We will never become God, but as beings created in His image, we can share His eternal nature.

Scripture itself speaks of the soul existing outside the body after death, and that becomes even more apparent in the New Testament if taken literally. However, they like to interpret the New Testament through the lens of the Old Testament. This is a backwards approach. Older revelation should precede newer revelation. They will also reinterpret any verses that support dualism and explain it away through the use of allegory. This is ironic since allegory originates from Greek thought, and part of their rejection of dualism is their belief that it stems from Greek influence, a claim that I have previously refuted.

So, how can we know if the soul persists after physical death? Perhaps the closest we can get is Near Death Experiences (NDEs). NDEs are not always unverifiable or subjective. There have been instances where those who have had near-death experiences were able to recount things they shouldn't have been able to know. One of the best documented cases is that of Pam Reynolds:

Pam had a bulging aneurysm that required radical surgery. After she was given anesthesia, Dr. Robert Spetzler chilled her body to 60°F/15.6°C, stopped her heart so no blood flowed to the brain, and drained her brain of blood. That gave him a 30-minute window to complete the surgery. Her eyes were lubricated and sealed shut, and her vitals were completely monitored during this time, including her brainwaves. During the operation, she was clinically dead. To further confirm this, they had earplugs in both her ears that emitted a loud 100 dB click every second to stimulate the nerves in her ears so they could record the brain waves. When she stopped responding to the clicks, they knew all brain activity had ceased.

That’s when something extraordinary happened. She recalled feeling being pulled out the top of her head and out of her body. She was able to observe her own surgery, including the operating equipment, the sounds they made, and the conversations in the operating room. This should have been impossible because she wasn’t physically able to see or hear anything, let alone she had no brain activity. She then recalled being pulled through a tunnel of sorts into a place of light. She saw figures, including her deceased grandmother. They communicated to her that if she went any further, she couldn’t return to her body. After the surgery, the doctors warmed up her body, restarted her heart, and brought her back to life. All these events were confirmed by Dr. Spetzler in the BBC documentary The Day I Died.

Then there is the mystery of consciousness. Science has not been able to prove that consciousness resides solely in the brain. Even when the brain is sliced in two, parts are taken out, or it is stimulated by electrodes, consciousness remains intact. If you remove a single gear in a mechanical watch, it will cease to function. But if parts of the brain are missing or taken out, consciousness can remain intact. It might result in physical impairments, but consciousness remains as a single unified force without any moving parts. This would suggest that consciousness (the soul) is not material, just like our thoughts, but is non-local and resides elsewhere.