The fact that the word “Reincarnation” exists, warrants further investigation.

I was intrigued when I saw a documentary some time ago about a very young boy who insisted that his natural birth mother was not his mother.
This child eventually identified his previous mother who was still living and through his insistence police found his previous body – that of a girl who had drowned in a nearby lake.

This is not an isolated case and if you are interested in “solved” reincarnation claims then do a search for “Dr. Stevenson”.

The video below is philosophy professor Dr. Robert Almeder of Georgia State University discussing reincarnation and societal reactions, focusing especially on the work of the late Dr. Ian Stevenson, 7/24/2000.

Transcript:

I was simply watching television one day and I saw the BB special on reincarnation and it was

very accidental and Ian Stevenson was standing there talking quietly about case studies he had

conducted over a 15 or 20 year period and he showed on the television the book 20 cases

suggestive of reincarnation – I thought that might be very interesting so I went out and bought

the book and I started reading the book and one of the things you find when you read the case

studies rather than talk about what they are without reading them closely, there’s a kind of

force to the case studies that is really enticing – enthralling and what I did is I read them

all the way through and I put down the book and I said well now this must be wrong – and so I

began reading again and the more I read the more I realized that this was important and that

this was good empirical research and that it rendered it a scientific question and that I could

not think of any alternative explanation as plausible for the data as that some people

reincarnate. As a matter of fact some people have said after reading the data in the past ten

years why it’s not unreasonable to believe that some people reincarnate – and Stevenson says

that -” It’s certainly not unreasonable to believe because this is the best fit on the data”. My

reaction is stronger, my claim was that in the book that it’s irrational to disbelieve it and a

lot of people thought well that that was over the top that was too strong a claim. I meant it

in a very simple way, that if you have a very commanding argument that you can’t refute – not

to accept the argument is to act irrationally. That’s what I’m saying that there is a very strong

argument here that has not been refuted and can not be refuted by my likes – not, can not but

has not been refuted and it’s irrational not to be accepted it and the conclusion is that some

people reincarnate. Meaning by implication that human beings are more than their bodies, that

human personality in the end is not reducible to a statement about biochemical states, brain

states, biological prosaic properties produced by brain states or any thing like that. Well what

follows is that human personality as we know it can not be adequately understood in terms of

classical standard psychology which works on a purely materialistic basis. In other words to

explain human behavior, why people do what they do, on a purely materialistic model; which we

typically do will leave important things out because if human beings are more than their bodies

and their minds and minds are causally relevant in producing their behaviors and the minds are

not simply brains, then to explain the behavior you have to appeal to causes that are quite

unlike anything people in standard psychology talk about. So one of the implications of this,

would be that there’s something wrong with psychology as we know it on a purely physiological

model. That it will not succeed in explaining these kind of cases and probably not a number of

others. So in other words if this data is acceptable it shows that our way of explaining human

behavior has to break out of the existing paradigm. I also suggest that there are some incredible

mysteries here about human nature that we can’t begin to fathom. Stevenson is the primary, prime

mover of the data because he’s made it a research project for 30 or 40 years of examining

children and seeing whether their claims to have relived – be reliving – to have reincarnated

are actually substantial. His work is revolutionary in that he’s the first one to take the

children seriously asking what would it take to show that what they are saying is true and his

work is revolutionary in that without being overly aggressive about it he takes each alternative

explanation of the cases that are strong and shows why they don’t seem to work very well. As for

his integrity, he doesn’t push the view on anybody [and some people have said that but] he

doesn’t push the view on anybody and I think he is incapable of the kind of lie , distortion or

manipulation of the data, that others would submit to – because I think he is more interested in

really finding out what it is and he is careful enough to say that certain cases are bad cases

- they’re frauds and so on. So I find him a person of great integrity.

Somebody said; you know why even get involved with all this because 80% of it is fraud. And I

believe that may be true 80% of it may be fraud. But the important point is that if 100 people

jump of the empire state building and 95 of them land just as you expect they would , by

painfully and disastrously – but 5 land gently and walk away – what do you think needs to be

explained?  The 5 that landed gently and walked away they are statistically deviant, so some

people will say in statistics you don’t have to explain any of this data because it’s so

infrequent and it’s statistically deviant and most cases like this will turn out to be frauds but

when you take the clear cases and the hard cases you can’t explain those away by saying they’re

like the other ones because you take them because they are very much unlike the other ones that

were wrong – so that sort of story. So then – and there will be other objections too – I’ve

heard people say reincarnation couldn’t occur because we don’t know how it could occur, we

don’t know how as scientists we don’t know what the mechanism is, it couldn’t have a mechanism

that we could examine so we can’t know that it occurs. As objections go that certainly leaves a

good deal to be desired because you may not know how something occurs but have plenty of

evidence that it occurs. I don’t know how Slu Foot won the fifth race at Higherlier but I can

know that he did very easily – I don’t know how you got into this room – but I know that you’re

here – that sort of story. So you don’t have to know why things end up the way they are,

although in pure science all our explanations will be causal – but there are  kinds of explanations

of events that are not causal but are purely statistical you know that something is occurring

but you don’t know why.