Objection 78: Ecclesiastes 12:7 proves that there is a conscious, immortal entity that leaves the body at death. (See, also, Eccl. 3:21.)
Ecclesiastes 12:7 reads,
"Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it."
This text speaks of the dissolution of man at death. Both the Greek word, pneuma and the Hebrew word ruach primarily mean “wind” or “breath.” In the passage above, ruach is used colloquially to mean the life of a person, because when we stop breathing we die. So when the breath returns to God, i.e., when we stop breathing, the body begins turning to dust. The verse is saying that when we die, our body decomposes into dust, which returns to the earth, and our life returns to God, the great giver of life.
Those who believe in the immortal soul doctrine interpret this to mean that a disembodied consciousness floats away to heaven. We do not accept this interpretation, for the following reasons:
1. Ecclesiastes 12:7 tells us that the ruach or “breath” returns to God who gave it. Is our breathing a conscious entity when God gives it to us? No. When babies are born and the doctor slaps their bottom, and they gulp their first breath of air, they are conscious of very little; a personality takes years to grow and develop. What God gives us when we are born is merely breath. Why then, would we expect that what returns to God is not that same breath, but rather a disembodied personality?
But the case is much stronger than that. Remember that equating “breath” or breathing with life is colloquial; in fact, it takes both more and less to make a human being than the ability to breath which, if you temporarily lose it, can be done for you by a machine. A baby is alive as a separate human being from the moment of conception, when the joining of DNA from both mother and father gives him his full genetic complement, the full organic blueprint of what he is to develop into physically. Your mother breathes for you for the next 40 weeks or so (just as a machine might breathe for you at the other end of your life), but you are already a separate being. Is the baby conscious at the moment of conception? Of course not, yet that is when we can say, with scientific rigor, that God has given the child the “spark of life,” has overseen the procreation of a new being.
Now, the Bible teaches the preexistence of Christ before He was born as a male child in Bethlehem (See, e.g., John 1:1-16), but that is one of the things that makes Christ very different from the rest of us: we were not preexistent beings before we were conceived. Each child conceived is unique, genetically different from every other child who ever lived, or who will ever live.
(One caveat on this issue: my understanding is that Mormons do believe that there is a backlog of souls waiting in heaven for a body to be born into. But this is a unique Mormon teaching, and smacks more of Eastern and pagan religious concepts, such as reincarnation and the transmigration of souls, and is not found in Judaism, Christianity, or Islam.)
2. Solomon, in his book of Ecclesiastes, is making a general statement about the human condition. He is not talking only about the saved. God gives life to everyone, and everyone dies, so presumably everyone’s spirit returns to God as described in Eccl. 12:7. If the spirit which returns to God is a conscious entity, then all men, whether good or bad, go to God at death. Are all to have the same destination? Do the unsaved go to heaven to be with God?
It might be argued that the wicked go to God only to receive judgment, yet the Bible is clear that the execution of judgment is a future event that does not even begin to happen until the Second Coming. (See Matt. 25:31-46; Rev. 22:12) So if we interpret the term “spirit” as these folks do, we are forced to conclude that even the eternally lost have been enjoying heaven for hundreds or perhaps even thousands of years waiting for the judgment. What an astonishing doctrine!
3. Of the creation of man we read, "The Spirit of God hath made me, and the breath of the Almighty hath given me life." Job 33:4. And life is contemporaneous with that God-given breath: "All the while my breath is in me, and the spirit of God is in my nostrils." Job 27:3. If God decided to withdraw his life-giving spirit from the world, everyone would die at once: “if He set his heart upon man, if he gather unto himself his spirit and his breath; all flesh shall perish together, and man shall turn again unto dust." Job 34:14-15. The spirit returns to God because it came from God and because God gathers it to Himself. There is nothing here to indicate a disembodied consciousness.
What about Ecclesiastes 3:21, which reads as follows: “Who knows the spirit of man that goes upward, and the spirit of the beast that goes downward to the earth?” Because this text says that man's spirit goes upward and the beast's downward at death, we are supposed to conclude that therefore man, in contrast to the beast, has an immortal soul, or spirit, that soars heavenward at death.
This interpretation raises many of the problems we’ve already discussed, e.g., at death all men go “upward” to heaven—which is practically universal salvation, and clearly wrong—plus additional problems, such as that animals have souls. ore than they wish it to prove.
Furthermore, in the immediately preceding verses, Solomon explicitly states that as regards their destination at death, there is no difference between man and beast. “For that which befalls the sons of men befalls beasts; even one thing befalls them. As one dies, so dies the other; yea, they have all one breath; so that a man bath no preeminence above a beast: for all is vanity. All go unto one place; all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again.” Eccl. 3:19-20. (The Hebrew words here translated "breath" and "spirit" are both from the same Hebrew word: ruach.)
Believers in the immortal soul doctrine find themselves in perplexity is that they define the word "spirit" (ruach), when it is used in relation to man, as an immortal conscious person, but when the exact same word is used in relation to beasts, they are content to define it abstractly as the principle of life, the breath of life. They must make this arbitrary distinction in definition because, without it, either man and beasts both have an immortal soul or neither are possessed of such an entity.
Seventh day Adventists find no necessity of making arbitrary differences in definition of a word. We see in such a passage as Ecclesiastes 3:19-21 a simple statement that life from God is given to all, man and beasts, and that at death that life returns to God.
To be clear, we believe that man was made in "the image of God," which the beasts were not. We believe that man has a moral nature, which the beasts have not. We believe that man may have communion with God, which the beasts cannot. We believe that man will answer at a final judgment day for all his deeds, which the beasts will not. Finally, we believe that man may ultimately be translated to dwell with God in an earth made new, which the beasts will not.