Soul Exists Scientific Proof Of Reincarnation.
By Dylan Harper.
A lot of people are resistant to the idea of a soul because of how this term has gotten
wrapped up in religious superstition and dogma.
Some people think it is outright silly.
But the concept of consciousness being able to detach from the body offers a lot of explanatory
power when it comes to phenomenon such as Near Death Experiences, Out-Of-Body Experiences,
astral projections, and even reincarnation.
In fact, the evidence for reincarnation is the best hard scientific evidence we have
for the existence of a soul.
This is a bold claim, but the evidence for reincarnation is undeniable and cannot collectively
be attributed to chance or any other physical explanation.
If reincarnation exists, the soul exists.
Let�s take a look!
Before we explore the evidence, it�s helpful to remember that we do not need hard PROOF
in order to be justified in believing in something.
If the weatherman says there is a 70% chance of showers, I don�t need proof that it�s
going to rain before I am justified in bringing an umbrella with me.
I don�t have to be certain that a meteor isn�t going to fall on my head before I
go outside.
I don�t need hard scientific proof of extra-terrestrial life in order to be justified in believing
that life exists on other planets, because there are so many good reasons that, when
taken together cumulatively, provide a plausible account for belief in life on other planets.
This is known as �abductive reasoning� and is the kind of reasoning we use most in
our every day lives.
Reincarnation is not something you can objectively measure in the same way you can measure a
chemical reaction, so it may even be in principle non-provable using the scientific method.
Science is the empirical measurement of the natural world, and the soul is something which
would exist beyond the natural world.
So the question is, �Are there enough solid pieces of evidence that, when taken together,
provide a compelling case for reincarnation?� I think the answer is a resounding yes.
The scientific evidence for reincarnation
Dr. Ian Stevenson, Ph.D., former Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Virginia
School of Medicine, spent 40 years researching reincarnation stories 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 know people from their
alleged past lives.
According to Stevenson, the number of cases that are worth considering is so high that
it exceeds the ability of him and his team to investigate them all.
Birth Marks
Facial recognition software confirmed that there was in fact a facial resemblance to
their alleged prior incarnation.
Some had birth marks on places where they allegedly suffered fatal wounds from in their
past life.
They were often dramatic and sometimes bizarre lesions, such as malformed digits or missing
limbs, misshapen heads, and odd markings.
As Dr. Stevenson writes in his paper �Birthmarks and Birth Defects Corresponding to Wounds
on Deceased Persons� in the peer-reviewed Journal of Scientific Exploration:
�About 35% of children who claim to remember previous lives have birthmarks and/or birth
defects that they (or adult informants) attribute to wounds on a person whose life the child
remembers.
The cases of 210 such children have been investigated.
The birthmarks were usually areas of hairless, puckered skin; some were areas of little or
no pigmentation (hypopigmented macules); others were areas of increased pigmentation (hyperpigmented
nevi).
The birth defects were nearly always of rare types.
In cases in which a deceased person was identified the details of whose life unmistakably matched
the child�s statements, a close correspondence was nearly always found between the birthmarks
and/or birth defects on the child and the wounds on the deceased person.
In 43 of 49 cases in which 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 the children recalled were far too specific to be chalked up to chance.
In an article where 3 cases were looked at in great detail by Dr. Stevenson, he reported
that each of the 3 children made roughly 30-40 claims regarding memories that had 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 they lived in.
It was not uncommon for Stevenson to encounter a child who could go into a town he had never
been in before and give him the details of the village, former personal belongings, the
neighbourhood in which he lived in a past life, and the people who he use to associate
with.
As he concludes: �It was possible in each case to find a family that had lost a member
whose life corresponded to the subject�s statements.
The statements of the subject, taken as a group, were sufficiently specific so that
they could not have corresponded to the life of any other person.
We believe we have excluded normal transmission of the correct information to the subjects
and that they obtained the correct information they showed about the concerned deceased person
by some paranormal process.�
Phobias from past-life traumas
Something which interested Dr. Stevenson was the phobias that were developed from past-life
traumas.
As Dr. Jim Tucker writes:
�Another area that interested Ian was the behavior of these children.
He wrote a paper about phobias that many of the children showed, 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 they had made their
claims about the previous life.
For example, he described a girl in Sri Lanka who as a baby resisted baths so much that
three adults had to hold her down to give her one.
By the age of six months, she also showed a marked phobia of buses and then later described
the life of a girl in another village who had been walking along a narrow road between
flooded paddy fields when she stepped back to avoid a bus going by, fell into the flood
water, and drowned.� The original journal article these findings were published can
be found here.
Recognition from the scientific community
What seems to be more than mere chance is that children were able to accurately identify
former acquaintances and relationships they had with people in their prior lives.
Most impressively 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 findings were put together in a book called Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation.
For further reading, this book would really be your best bet.
The American Journal of Psychiatry reviewed these cases and said there were ��cases
recorded in such full detail as to persuade the open mind that reincarnation is a tenable
hypothesis to explain them��.
He had several other books and papers published and widely accepted in the mainstream community.
As a review in the Journal of the American Medical Association stated ��In regard
to reincarnation he has painstakingly and unemotionally collected a detailed series
of cases from India, cases in which the evidence is difficult to explain on any other grounds.��
The reviewer added: ��He has placed on record a large amount of data that cannot
be ignored��.
His one paper called ��The Explanatory Value of the Idea of Reincarnation�� had
thousands of requests for reprints by scientists all over the world.
His findings were also published in peer reviewed journals the Journal of Nervous and Mental
Disease, 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 son�s diaper.
Her young toddler unexpectedly said, �When I was your age, I used to change your diapers.�
Sam Taylor, of Vermont, was born 18 months following his grandfather�s death.
When he made this comment, he was only a few years old.
When he was four and a half years old, however, Taylor was able to pick out his grandfather
from a class picture of about 20 people and identify his grandfather�s first car from
a photograph.
Here is video of a young boys reincarnation story covered by ABC news to provide you a
glimpse into the nature of these cases.
It�s important to note that this case is American, so the parents are not influencing
or encouraging the boy to believe in reincarnation in the name of culture or religion:
Conclusion
This is just a small fraction of the amount of evidence that exists for reincarnation.
Upon coming to a conclusion about all his findings and his publications, we have to
ask ourselves �What is the best explanation that can accommodate all of this evidence?�
Why would there be so many cases of children who claim to have been other people, who know
the specific names and interpersonal relationships of the person they recall being, who have
similar behavior and personalities as the people they claimed to be, who have birthmarks
and abnormalities where they claimed to have suffered wounds in their past lives, and who
have specific phobias linked back to alleged past life traumas if reincarnation did not
exist?
When we consider that there is no naturalistic explanation that can account for all of data,
and when we consider the explanatory power of reincarnation, we are more than justified
in subscribing to reincarnation for scientific reasons.
The accounts are far too precise to be chalked up as chance, and all other explanations are
impoverished in trying to explain such a wide array of data.
Reincarnation can no longer be looked at as some woo-woo, pseudoscientific, religiously
dogmatic New Age fantasy, and neither can the soul.
We can infer the reality of the soul because it is the best explanation for all of the
given data.
There must be a non-physical part of us (consciousness itself, perhaps) that contains memories that
leaves our body and then enters into a new body.
This is a hypothesis which has gotten serious attention in the mainstream academic community,
and is still ripe with investigation to this day.
When we take all the evidence together and look at it without religious or scientific
bias getting in the way, it seems as though we are not only justified in believing in
reincarnation, but it also may be the best of all explanations
for the strongest cases.
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