…Destruction, we should naturally assume, means the unmaking, or cessation, of the destroyed.  And people often talk as if the ‘annihilation’ of a soul were intrinsically possible.  In all our experience, however, the destruction of one thing means the emergence of something else.  Burn a log, and you have gases, heat and ash.  To have been a log means now being those three things.  If souls can be destroyed, must there not be a state of having been a human soul?  And is not that, perhaps, the state which is equally well described as torment, destruction, and privation?   (C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, pg. 127)