Many people are resistant to the idea of a “soul” because of the way this term became shrouded in religious superstition and dogma. Some people think it’s completely ridiculous. But the concept of consciousness of being able to separate the body offers a lot of explanatory power when it comes to such phenomena as Near Death Experiences, Out of Body, astral projections, and even reincarnation.
In fact, the evidence for reincarnation is the best scientific evidence we have for the existence of a soul. This is a bold statement, but the evidence for reincarnation is undeniable and can not be collectively attributed to chance or any other physical explanation. If reincarnation exists, there is the soul. Let’s take a look!
Before exploring the evidence, it is helpful to remember that we do not need concrete evidence in order to be justified in believing in something. If the meteorologist says there is a 70% chance of rain, I do not need proof that it will rain before I am justified in bringing an umbrella with me. I’m not sure a meteor will not fall on my head before I go outside.
I do not need hard scientific evidence of extraterrestrial life in order to be justified in believing that there is life on other planets because there are many good reasons that when taken together cumulatively provide a plausible explanation for the belief in life On other planets. This is known as “abductive reasoning” and is the kind of reasoning that we use most in our daily lives.
Reincarnation is not something that you can measure objectively in the same way that you can measure a chemical reaction, so it may even be, in principle, non-demonstrable using the scientific method. Science is the empirical measure of the natural world, and the soul is something that would exist beyond the natural world. So the question is, “Are there enough solid pieces of proof that when taken together, they provide a compelling case for reincarnation?” I think the answer is a resounding yes.
The scientific evidence for reincarnation
Dr. Ian Stevenson, Ph.D., a former professor of psychiatry at the University of Virginia School of Medicine, has spent 40 years researching stories of reincarnation within children. This former chairman of the Department of Psychiatry and Neurology investigated over 3000 independent stories of children who claimed to have memories and meet people from their purported past lives. According to Stevenson, the number of cases worth considering is so high that it exceeds his and his team’s ability to investigate all of them.
Birthmarks
A Face Recognition Software confirmed that there was in fact a facial resemblance to his supposed previous incarnation. Some had birthmarks in places where they reportedly suffered life-threatening injuries in their past life. They were often dramatic and sometimes bizarre injuries, such as malformed digits or amputated limbs, deformed heads, and strange markings. As Dr. Stevenson wrote in his article “Birthmarks and Birth Defects Corresponding to Wounds on Deceased Persons” in the peer-reviewed Journal of Scientific Exploration:
“An attack of 35% of children who claim to remember previous lives have birthmarks and / or birth defects that they (or adult informants) attribute to injuries in a person whose life the child still remembers.
Cases of 210 of these children were investigated. Birthmarks were usually areas of hairless, wrinkled skin; Some were areas of little or no pigmentation (hypopigmented macules); Others were areas of increased pigmentation (hyperpigmented nevi).
Birth defects were almost always rare. In cases where a dead person was identified the details of whose life unmistakably combined statements of the child, close correspondence was almost always found between birthmarks and / or birth defects in the child and the wounds in the dead person.
In 43 of 49 cases where a medical document (usually a postmortem report) was obtained, it confirmed the correspondence between wounds and birthmarks (or birth defects). ”
Verifiable Memories of Past Lives
The memories of the children summoned were too specific to be attributed to chance. In an article where they were looked at in 3 cases in great detail by Dr. Stevenson, he reported that each of the three children made about 30-40 claims concerning memories of their past lives, 82-92% of which were both verifiable And correct.
The particularities and specific details that were given by the children ranged from anything from the names, personalities and occupations of their former parents and siblings to the precise layouts of the houses in which they lived. It was not uncommon for Stevenson to find a child who could enter a town he had never been before and give him the details of the village, old personal belongings, the neighborhood he lived in in a past life, and the people he used to connect.
As he concludes: “It was possible in each case to find a family that had lost a member, whose life corresponded to the individual’s statements. The statements of the subject, taken as a group, were sufficiently precise so that they could not have corresponded to the life of any other person.
We believe we have excluded normal transmission from the correct information to the individuals and that we obtained the correct information they showed about the dead person in question by some paranormal process. ”
Past-life trauma phobias
Something that Dr. Stevenson was interested in was the phobias that were developed from past-life traumas. As Dr. Jim Tucker writes:
“Another area they had been interested in was the behavior of these children. He wrote an article about phobias that many of the children presented, usually related to the mode of death from the life they claimed to remember (Stevenson, 1990a).
He reported that 36% of the children in a series of 387 cases showed such fears. They occurred when the children were very young, sometimes before making their statements about the previous life. For example, he described a girl in Sri Lanka who as a baby endured so much a bath that three adults had to hold her down to give her one.
At the age of six months she also showed a sharp phobia of buses and then later described the life of a girl in another village walking down a narrow road among flooded rice paddies when she stepped back to avoid a bus Passing, fell into the water of the flood, and drowned. “The original daily article these results have been published can be found here.
The recognition of the scientific community
What appears to be more than mere chance is that the children were able to accurately identify old acquaintances and relationships they had with people in their previous lives.
Most impressive was a Lebanese girl who was able to remember and identify 25 different people from her past life and the interpersonal relationships she had with them.
His best results were put together in a book called Twenty cases suggestive of reincarnation. To read more, this book would really be your best bet. The American Journal of Psychiatry evaluated these cases and said that there were “cases recorded in such full detail as to convince the open mind that reincarnation is a defensible hypothesis to explain them.” He had several other books and articles published and widely accepted in the mainstream community.
As a review in the Journal of the American Medical Association stated “Regarding reincarnation he meticulously and emotionally collected a detailed series of cases from India, cases in which the evidence is difficult to explain for any other reason.
“The reviewer added:” It has put on record a lot of data that can not be ignored. ” His only document called “The Explanatory Value of the Reincarnation Idea” had thousands of requests for reprints by scientists around the world.
Their findings were also published in journals from the Journal of Nervous and Mental Illness, and the International Journal of Comparative Sociology.
During a presentation at Penn State University in 2005, Dr. Jim B. Tucker, a child psychiatrist at the University of Virginia, described how a mother was leaning over the changing table to change her child’s diaper. His young child unexpectedly said:
“When I was your age, I used to change your diapers.”
Sam Taylor, of Vermont, was born 18 months after his grandfather’s death. When he made this comment, he was only a few years older.
When he was four and a half years old, however, Taylor was able to choose his grandfather in a classic family picture of about 20 people and still identify his grandfather’s first car in another photograph.
The video of a young boys story and reincarnation covered by ABC news to provide you with a glimpse into the nature of these cases. It is important to note that in this case, it is American, so parents are not influencing or encouraging the boy to believe in reincarnation in the name of culture or religion:
Conclusion
This is only a small fraction of the amount of evidence that exists for reincarnation. In arriving at a conclusion about all its results and its publications, we must ask ourselves:
“What is the best explanation that can accommodate all this evidence?”
Why would there be so many cases of children who claim to have been other people ?, who knows the specific names and interpersonal relationships of the person they remember?, Who have similar behavior and personalities as the people who claimed to be ?, who have birthmarks and Abnormalities where they claimed to have suffered injuries in their past lives and who have specific phobias linked back to supposed past life traumas ?, if there was no reincarnation?
When we consider that there is no naturalistic explanation that can be responsible for all data, and when we consider the explanatory power of reincarnation, we are more than justified in subscribing to reincarnation for scientific reasons.
Accounts are very accurate to be scratched up as an opportunity, and all other explanations are impoverished in an attempt to explain such a wide variety of data.
Reincarnation can no longer be confused as some woo-woo, pseudoscientific, religiously dogmatic New Age fantasy, or other of the kind.
We can infer from the reality of the soul, because it is the best explanation for all the data provided. There must be a non-physical part of us (consciousness itself, perhaps) that contains the memories that leaves our body and then enters a new body.
This is a hypothesis that has gotten a lot of attention in the mainstream academic community, and is still ripe with research to this day. When we take all the evidence together and look at it without religious or scientific prejudice getting in the way, it seems that we are not only justified in believing in reincarnation, but it can also be the best of all explanations for the strongest cases.
“It is not surprising to be born more than once; Everything in nature is the resurrection “-Voltaire