Why We Should Not Believe
Some of the smartest people I know believe in some form of reincarnation. They contrast mostly with people who believe in a heavenly afterlife. And those people who believe in heaven mostly also believe in a less than heavenly afterlife for many others. Some many millions believe that reincarnation is a repeated process that ends when one learns all the lessons of the many lives we live and go to nirvana, which is a kind of heaven, I guess. It seems that when you put all of these people together you get a massive majority who think there is something beyond or after the corporeal existence we now experience.
In the vast majority we reject the idea of a permanent extinction of ourselves. The body dies and rots. We don’t deny that. But across time and culture we separate our bodies from ourselves, or at least we believe that this happens at our physical death.
There’s a whole lot of stuff to unpack in that, from the how and why to the when and where. I’ll take that up in force another time, and only touch on it here. Today I’ll mostly stick with reincarnation. And to be more narrow, I’ll skip entirely the versions of this belief where each new life is in the body of some different creature. A dog in one, a mouse, a fly, a bird, etc, in others. I’ll stick only to the concept that a person lived as a person in a previous life, and that they will become yet another person in the next, and so on.
Let me get out early that I am not claiming it isn’t true, but I believe a careful look at reason will likely bring most people to the rejection of the claim that it is a real phenomenon. Or more simply that the idea is implausible and does not meet the burden of proof.
Let’s get started.
Most of us have heard claims of reincarnation. Whether in books, TV or film, or personal anecdotes; they range from the absurd to the compelling. But the problem with these claims is that they are not falsifiable. That is one of the distinctions between science and pseudoscience. I can say that I have never heard a reincarnation story that held up well to scrutiny. But I can’t say that I never will. I can’t prove a negative. No one can. (Yes, one can be inferred under some circumstances, but it is unlikely.) And so when someone claims a previous life, you can’t prove them wrong. And since you can’t prove any claim wrong, and since all claims cannot be true, we are left with all claims being possibly true and possibly false. This makes every claim worthless from a truth perspective. If a claim could lead to either a true conclusion or a false conclusion, than it is not a reliable path to truth. Ultimately, all claims of reincarnation are stories that are impossible to prove from the evidence available.
To our minds there is no difference from an experience we had, and an experience we believe we had but didn’t. Vast studies have been done and shelves full of books have been written about implanted memories and our inability to distinguish between those and actual memories. What we remember about our past life could well have been learned about or invented during this life. I could go on about this for a time, but to learn more please research false memory.
But what about the things that would only have been known to that past person? Throw them out. There is no way to tell the difference between a fact known only to the deceased person and the imagination of the claimant. You cannot verify it a true claim without admitting it could have been learned. If only the dead know, then you can’t prove your claim true; and if the claim can be verified, then someone else knew it and could have been the source of your knowledge. To add to this thought I’ll say that whenever I hear or read the claim of knowledge that only could be known to the dead person I suspect deceit and fraud at work. It is the ultimate unprovable claim, and is offered to overcome objections of learned knowledge.
What about young children, too young to have learned, who relate details of a known person and their life?
This is where a skeptical mind can be helpful. Have you really heard such a story as described? Or have you heard a similar story from an adult claiming that he knew all this when he was a young child? Or a parent claiming it was what they heard from a child? The simple idea that a child started revealing details about a past life into a tape-recorder when they were just able to speak unprompted by an adult strains credibility. The idea that an adult could reflect back to his or her early childhood and remember themselves remembering a past life cannot be treated as reliable. Perhaps their tale is compelling, and maybe even makes you wonder. But as to the truth of that claim, how could you do to prove it? You couldn’t, which makes anecdotes such poor evidence. But there are so many stories, surely they can’t all be false! But if each one is unreliable for its unfalsifiability, then collectively they aren’t evidence of reincarnation. A thousand bad pieces of evidence do not add up to one good one.
Try it this way: If I say that I am the reincarnation of Napoleon Bonaparte, can you prove I am not? No, you can’t. I could spend all evening enlightening (or boring) you with amazing details and insights of Napoleon’s life, even from a first person perspective and you would still recognize that I could have learned it all. I could claim to know something that only the emperor himself could have known, but how would you know I wasn’t making it up? If only Napoleon could have known it, how can you verify that my claim is true? And because of the obvious supposition that a person might make such a claim in an attempt to gain notoriety or fame, your incredulity of my story would be just. But there are five-thousand guys out there claiming that they were Napoleon, surely they all can’t be false! Sure, I don’t believe this one, and that one, and that one; and I’m not going to check them all, but one must be true, right? This is where we acknowledge that lots of bad evidence doesn’t add up to some good evidence. That should be re-read. Millions and millions of believing children does not make a real Santa Claus. You can take the example and apply it anywhere it fits. Five-thousand stories of being reincarnated from Cleopatra does not prove that one of them is true. It could be a million claims or three, and we are still left with an unfalsifiable claim.
But the whole idea of reincarnation is implausible at the start. When did reincarnation begin? There are something like seven-point-seven billion people on the planet at this writing. At the time of Napoleon (er, I mean me, or one of those other guys) there was less than a billion. If reincarnation began then, that means less than one out of seven people could be reincarnated. Or did it begin at the beginnings of civilization? Or when man began walking upright? Was Napoleon reincarnated from a caveman? No matter where you begin, it is mathematically impossible for everyone to have a past life. Do people develop the ability to reincarnate, or is it just some people alway reappearing in a new body? Either only some people reincarnate, whether selectively or randomly, or reincarnation is spread like a shotgun blast into future generations. Believers in reincarnation always begin their argument with unfalsifiable claims, when what they need to do is offer a model of how it works. They need to show a mechanism to explain it. They need to begin with what it is that is being passed on.
Countless studies have shown that what we think and know are products of our brains, and that our brains cease to function when we die. (As in permanent death, not simple heart failure prior to revival.) There has never been anything evidenced to show that any part of that brain function, our thoughts, or feelings carries on outside of our physical selves in the present, or continues after death. Does the essence of self float up into the ether and waft around until picked up by some new person? And what if they find that new person occupied already? In trying to imagine how it would work I’m left with the feeling that silliness was not considered when reincarnation was first proposed. A reasonable claim for reincarnation needs to identify and prove the existence of some extracorporeal intelligence and a method for transmitting it forward into another being. Without that the stories and claims are nothing but fanciful tales built on false premises and poor reasoning.
The simple assertion that people are reincarnated is not a complete logical syllogism. To work the claim of reincarnation through logic let’s build one. A syllogism is a short form logical structure to demonstrate a conclusion from two or more premises. If the syllogism is structurally sound and the premises are true, than the conclusion must be true. A common example goes like this:
Premise 1: All men are mortal
Premise 2: Socrates was a man
Conclusion: Socrates was mortal.
The structure is correct as are both premises, therefor the conclusion is true.
We could change this syllogism to make it not correct.
Premise 1: All men are mortal
Premise 2: Dogs often bark
Conclusion: Socrates was a dog.
Here the two premises are true while the conclusion is false. This is because of a logical fallacy known as a non sequitur. The conclusion does not follow the premises.
Another would be:
Premise 1: All men are card sharps
Premise 2: Socrates was a man
Conclusion: Socrates was a card sharp
Here with have structurally sound syllogism that reaches a false conclusion because one of the premises is false.
So to make a claim for reincarnation we might state it thus:
Premise 1: The human soul is made of energy
Premise 2: Energy cannot be destroyed
Conclusion: The soul continues on after we die
In this there are two fallacies. The second is that if it did prove that the soul continues after death it does not prove that it begins in a new body. But the first error is that premise 1 is an assertion without evidence. There is no evidence that such a thing as a soul is real, let alone what it might be made of. Prior to accepting that our soul, our consciousness, or whatever one might call it returns to another life after we die, we must first prove it exists at all separate from what was created by our brains during our lives. This is the opposite of what has been found in serious study over many decades. We have good reason to believe that consciousness is a product of a functioning brain in a living person and that it ceases to exist upon the death of that brain.
This makes premise 1 unproven which leads to a false conclusion. You could try and structure a syllogism in a variety of ways, but in the end no claim of past or future life can be treated seriously without first proving the existence of an immortal conscious and a means of transfer. Simply asserting that it is true and relating unprovable stories cannot be considered a reliable path to truth.
It seems to me that life is a wondrous thing. A once in forever thing to be dealt with as we wish and with awareness of its finality, and our immortality is the spread of our DNA throughout the collective whole of us. I’ve done a lot of genealogical research. One side of my family is well documented and a unique surname appears so far and wide in the United States that I cannot count my cousins so numerous are they. And that is only going back a couple and a half centuries. Our collective interconnectedness boggles the mind. Unless you are from Africa, you probably have two-percent neanderthal DNA. The interbreeding between humans and neanderthals began after humans migrated out of Africa. From over thirty-thousand years ago they remain immortal in you. And in me. And if any of us die without producing offspring (and I hope many do for the sake of the planet), we can rest assure that the genes in us are a lot like the genes in everyone else. But having genetic history is not the same as conscious history, and it should not be inferred. I make mention of DNA to give comfort to our desire to outlast our bodies.
We may feel like we have always been conscious and it may seem impossible to imagine not being so, but we haven’t any good reason to think otherwise. Questions about why we are here, and what happens next may entertain and stimulate our minds on long winter nights, but they remain as unanswerable as ever. At least in any way that could be called reasonable. We are here. We will die. Momento Mori as the stoics of ancient Rome would say. We do not (and maybe cannot) know if anything is beyond, but we have no evidence that there is and no reason to think it so. That we don’t know leaves us unsatisfied, but it doesn’t give us license to invent something to fill in the space. “We don’t know what happens, therefore this happens” is a logical fallacy. Reincarnation is an assertion without evidence born from our finite brains attempting to deny mortality.
If you really just need some kind of answer to the meaning of it all, Douglas Adams helped us all out years ago. That answer is 42.