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What Evidence Would Be Sufficient To Prove Reincarnation?

Illiadus

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Greetings fellow skeptics,

My hope for this thread is to have as many people as possible state what criteria would satisfy their need for evidence to accept reincarnation as real. The purpose is to find a common ground, the smallest common denominator, if you will, of what is to be considered objective repeatable evidence in the field of reincarnation research, which is a rapidly growing enterprise.

These criteria, summed up, could then be used to debunk past life research, which, like UFOs and Bigfoots, presumably fall outside of the $1M challenge.

Just to get you started, there are three basic types of reincarnation research today:
- Kids with moles (Ian Stevenson)
- Hypnosis (Brian Weiss)
- Facial comparisions (Walter Semkiw)

Someone has to pick Walter.


Thank you!
Thomas the New Guy


NOTE: I've removed a potentially insulting joke about India and belief in reincarnation from this post, which is refered to by the earliest posters. I apologize for the confusion. It's my first day here, if that counts for anything.
 
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Illiadus said:
Should you bother? Well, there's a billion reincarnationists in India.
With nukes.
Click to expand...
Wouldn't a belief in reincarnation be an excellent reason not to use nuclear weapons? If you believe you're going off to heaven/72 virgins/whatever, who cares if the planet you leave behind is a smouldering crater? If I believed in reincarnation, the last thing I'd want is to have to spend my next life traipsing through a radioactive wasteland.
 
On a brief look at the three 'researchers' you list none of them appear to hold any great credibility.
On the assumption that reincarnation is the transferrance of a soul that previously resided in a being (now dead) to a new being (alive), the first thing that you need is evidence for the existence of a soul. Until you have that everything else is just evidence that weird stuff happens sometimes.
 
I'll try again:

If reincarnation was a real phenomenon, what evidence would prove its existence?
 
The moles and the faces are fruitless approaches. There is no way either of those could ever be considered evidence for reincarnation, as there is a far simpler, more realistic explanation - people have moles, and some people look like some other people.

The hypnosis thing could theoretically be used to provide evidence for reincarnation. The person under hypnosis would have to demonstrate knowledge that was verifiably possessed by his supposed earlier incarnation and that the person could not have acquired by any mundane means.

The latter condition is the problem, of course. I'm not aware of there being a situation in the past few decades where there has been verifiable information of a past event, but we can be absolutely certain that the people we are studying have never had access to said information. Certainly it's never been the case in any reincarnation studies that I know of.

The basic idea is, reincarnation can be accepted as a phenomenon if it can predict events with more accuracy than the accepted theories. The accepted theories predict that a human will not display accurate information if he has never acquired that information - in this life. If this prediction can be shown to be false, then we can talk about reincarnation.

All of that has very little to do with convincing Hindus, of course. If we want to convince them, we don't need to provide proper tests debunking reincarnation - we need to teach them why such tests are necessary.
 
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Are you calling me a racist, Sledge?

Which part was racist? That people in India believe in reincarnation or that they have nuclear weapons?
 
Yes. Yes I am. Oh, and editing your post after someone has referred to part of it is generally regarded as impolite at best.
 
I'm sorry, is this for real? I've offended you with a comment, but you're also offended that I removed the offensive comment so that it can't hurt anyone else's feelings?

Am I getting that right?
 
No, you're not getting that right. I asked you a question about something you said. Rather than respond to that, you've edited the comment out of your post. That is generally regarded as disingenuous.
 
Are you a troll?

You're not here to answer the question. Why are you here?
What do you want? I don't get it.
 
What Evidence Would Be Sufficient To Prove Reincarnation?

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Greetings fellow skeptics,

My hope for this thread is to have as many people as possible state what criteria would satisfy their need for evidence to accept reincarnation as real. The purpose is to find a common ground, the smallest common denominator, if you will, of what is to be considered objective repeatable evidence in the field of reincarnation research, which is a rapidly growing enterprise.

These criteria, summed up, could then be used to debunk past life research, which, like UFOs and Bigfoots, presumably fall outside of the $1M challenge.

Just to get you started, there are three basic types of reincarnation research today:
- Kids with moles (Ian Stevenson)
- Hypnosis (Brian Weiss)
- Facial comparisions (Walter Semkiw)

Someone has to pick Walter.


Thank you!
Thomas the New Guy
 
I think Mirrorglass summed it up pretty well - to begin with it needs to be demonstrated that a phenomenon exists.

If reincarnation was real, what effects would be detectable which are not explicable by alternative hypotheses? It depends on what precisely one means by reincarnation, though I guess a universal one would be possession of information which could not have been learned in this lifetime, yet can be verified as accurate (which of course makes it tricky to find, as one condition usually precludes the other).
 
Let's see: I ask you a question, you refuse to answer and edit your post to remove what I was questioning, and I'm the troll? I think I have a pictue of you somewhere... ah, here it is:

troll.jpg
 
Jack, thank you for answering the question.

In your opinion, what would constitute that a phenomenon exists that in Stevenson's words "suggests reincarnation" and thus needs to be explained?

If you let your imagination run wild, could anything make you go: "I need to find out if that is a sign of reincarnation"?
 
Sledge, I apologize both for the joke, which I now understand was inappropriate, and for making changes in the post. It's my first time here and I won't make the same mistake from now on.

Do you think we can get along?
 
I would accept reincarnation as real if Illiadus and Sledge are reincarnated as each other...
 
I think reincarnation would be incredibly hard to prove to a skeptic because there's no way for to properly blind a test.

If I take all my secrets to the grave and somebody else is born who claims to be me, how could they prove it? I can't confirm that they know super-secret information if I'm dead. If the secrets are known by any other people, then they're not truly secret, and that information could be passed on to a reincarnation claimant by mundane means.

If an enthusiast exclaims, "That's something only Stan would know!" that person is lying. How does he/she know something that "only" Stan would know?

I guess the "smallest threshhold" for me would be a very young child who was born already knowing all kinds of information that they wouldn't possibly have the time to acquire by natural means. A three-year old, say, who could do taxes and calculus, and talk about politics and pop culture across the decades with the experience of somebody who'd truly been there.

Nobody's studying those children because they don't exist. Most reincarnation claimants seem to only possess the very common knowledge of their alleged past lives, easily accessed through books or the internet.
 
Thank you, Countess, for your post.

Would a hypnotized three-year old with the type of knowledge you mention be acceptable as evidence? Or would it have to be spontaneous?
 
Either, as long as the hynotized three-year old could have an extended conversation, and answer questions from a variety of people about a wide variety of topics.

It can't be a rehearsed speech or a conversation limited to a few talking points which the child could have been forced to memorize.
 
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