ESSAY a Critique of Arguments Offered Against Reincarnation

Journal of Scienti$c Exploration, Vol. 1 1, No. 4, pp. 499-526, 1997 0892-33 10197 01997 Society for Scientific Exploration ESSAY A Critique of Arguments Offered Against Reincarnation Department of Philosophy, University Plazu, Georgia State University Atlanta, Georgia 30303-3083 Abstract - In his recently published book Reincarnation: A Critical Exami- nation (Amherst, New York: Promethius Books, 1996). Paul Edwards has offered a number of arguments against the possibility of reincarnation. It is a sweeping effort to show that the very idea of reincarnation is illogical and indefensible. While not arguing directly for reincarnation, this essay criticizes the main arguments, methodology and polemics wielded in what is more an effort to debunk than to carry out the critical examination claimed in the title of the book. In criticizing Edward's arguments this essay is criticizing the major objections available against the reincarnation hypothesis. Keywords: reincarnation -philosophy Introduction In his recent book Reincarnation: A Critical Examination (Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books, 1996), Paul Edwards examines critically both the belief in reincarnation and the belief in the Law of Karma. For the author, both beliefs are mutually entailing and demonstrably indefensible. The author is strongly inclined to think that the belief in reincarnation is conceptually inco- herent (rather than simply false) because of the "nonsensicality" of such no- tions as the "astral body" and the "womb-invasion" of the prospective mother by the soul or astral body. (p. 28) However popular such beliefs may be, the author seeks to show that they are not only foolish myths, unworthy of any rational human being, but also part of the tide of irrationalism sweeping the Western World. (p. 7) People who believe in reincarnation are lost to some fan- tastic form of occultism. (p. 58) Indeed, at every turn in the book the author feels quite strongly that no reasonable human being could take belief in reincarnation seriously, as even a minimally rational thesis. In passing, the author also defends the view that any argument for any form of personal post mortem survival is indefensible. Reincarnation is especially absurd, and any form of -- Editor's Note: Via an intermediary, Edwards declined an offer to publish a response to this essay. See also in this issue of the Journal (p. 569) an additional book review by James G. Matlock of Paul Ed- wards' Reincarnation: A Critical Examination (Amherst, New York: Promethius Books, 1996). 500 R. Almeder Cartesian dualism runs on all fours with it, primarily because any form of mind-body dualism entails the existence of astral bodies. For the author, taking any form of reincarnation seriously is certainly a sign of deep cognitive inadequacy; and, not infrequently, advancing the belief as a sound belief may well be a mark of moral turpitude falling under the rubric of a "holy lie" not uncommonly offered by religious fanatics or amusing brain- dead spiritualists. Indeed, nobody who knows anything at all about philosophy or science could be tempted to take the belief in any form of post mortem survival seriously. Often the author asserts, either directly or indirectly, that be- lievers in reincarnation and mind-body dualism are not at all different from the kind of true believer associated with fanatical religious sects or fanatical oc- cultists. What is interesting about the book is that it contains all of the major objections one can find in the literature against the belief in reincarnation, and examining the arguments offered by Edwards should count as an examination of the available arguments against the thesis, although, to be sure, as we shall see, Edwards has a few objections of his own that are not likely to be found anywhere else. The book, incidentally, has seventeen sections, all of which confront, either directly or indirectly, arguments favoring either reincarnation, or some form of personal survival of death. These sections bear the titles: 1. Reincarnation, Karma, and Competing Doctrines of Survival; 2. The Moral Argument; 3. The Law of Karma; 4. Child Prodigies, Deja Vu Experiences, and Group Reincar- nations; 5. The Rise and Fall of Bridey Murphy; 6. More Hypnotic Regres- sions and "Progressions"; 7. Spontaneous Memories of Earlier Lives; 8. The Conservation of Spiritual Energy; 9. The Astral Body; 10. Telephone Calls from the Dead, Birth-marks, and the Modus Operandi Problem; 11. Dr. Kubler Ross, Dr. Moody, and the New Immortality Movement; 12. The Fan- tasies of Dr. Kubler Ross; 13. Dr. Grof, LSD and the Amorous Snake Woman; 14. The Population Problem and Other Common Sense and Scientific Objec- tions; 15. The "Interregnum": What Happens Between Lives?; 16. More about Dr. Ian Stevenson, the "Galileo of Reincarnation"; 17. The Dependence of Consciousness on the Brain; and Irreverent Postscript: God and the Modus Operandi Problem. In any case, I submit that no argument offered in this book succeeds in advancing a plausible skeptical position because, apart from a number of other problems, the book conspicuously fails to confront effectively the central argument favoring the only rationally defensible form of reincarnation (or some form of personal survival) with any persuasive objections. To be sure, belief in reincarnation, as the author conceives it, may well be worthy of rational re- jection or consignment to the realm of religious inspiration or fanaticism; but the central question is whether the author's construal of the nature of reincarnation is a strawman that excludes the only form of reincarnation for which there is no adequate refutation, and for which the empirical evidence offered on its behalf amounts to offering a sound argument which it would be irra- Critique of Arguments Against Reincarnation 501 tional to reject. Let me explain, and then proceed to examine other specific arguments offered in the various sections of the book. The Definition of Reincarnation What seems basically problematic about this book is that the reincarnation hypothesis means different things to different people, and the author seeks to refute what he takes to be the main reincarnation thesis; but nowhere do we find a clear definition of what the main reincarnation thesis is, although the author is quite certain that any and all forms of reincarnation have certain collat- eral assumptions that are patently absurd - before one even looks at any pro- posed argument or evidence for the belief. Doubtless, there are some forms of reincarnation that are rationally indefensible, depending on what the advo- cates of those forms see as implied by the belief in reincarnation. But, as noted above, the question is whether there is any form of personal reincarnation (and by implication, the mind-body dualism) that is defensible by appeal to empirical evidence. To characterize the reincarnation thesis (along with mind-body dualism) in such a way that it must imply a host of absurd claims is, as we shall see, to offer a strawman of the thesis because we can defend a common form of reincarnation that does not imply such absurdity. Even so, the author has not the slightest doubt that there is no form of reincarnation that is even minimally defensible in any way. Moreover, the author never states just what he would accept as evidence for belief in some form of reincarnation because his every inclination is to think that the thesis is so absurd that nothing could possibly count as evidence for the view. Curiously enough, however, the author also asserts that certain empirical facts show conclusively that the belief in reincarnation must be false. He says, for example, that absence of true memory beliefs in the evidence often offered counts powerfully for the falsity of the thesis (p. 27; 234). This is curious because if the reincarnation hypothesis is empirically meaningless, it should not be empirically testable and falsifiable, and if it is empirically testable and falsifiable by appeal to some fact or other, it should not be vacu- ously falsifiable. To say that a hypothesis is a meaningful empirical hypothesis is to say that the hypothesis has test implications at the sensory level, sensory implications that allow us to either confirm or disconfirm the hypothesis. If nothing could conceivably count by way of test implications at the sensory level for either the truth of the hypothesis or the falsity of the hypothesis, it is not an empirical hypothesis. Moreover, standardly, if one can only empirically falsify a particular hypothesis (and nothing could conceivably count for con- firming it or accepting it), or if one could only confirm the hypothesis (and nothing could conceivably count for falsifying the hypothesis), it is not an empirical hypothesis; it is a dogma. One cannot have it both ways: the thesis can- I not be both absurd and yet empirically falsified. Nor can it be empirically fal- 502 R. Almeder acceptability. (Hempel, Introduction to Philosophy of Natural Science, Pren- tice Hall, 1972. p. 54) At any rate, for the sake of discussing adequately some of the author's more central objections to belief in reincarnation, let us simply assert the following statement as a hypothesis - without caring to say what might prompt the hypothesis: There is something essential to some human personalities, however we ultimately characterize it, which we cannot plausibly construe solely in terms of either brain states, or properties of brain states, or biological properties caused by the brain and, further, after biological death this non-reducible essential trait sometimes persists for some time, in some way, in some place, and for some reason or other, existing independently of the person's former brain and body. Moreover, after some time, some of these irreducible essential traits of human personality, for some reason or other, and by some mechanism or other, come to reside in other human bodies either some time during the gestation pe- riod, at birth, or shortly after birth.

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