… and from a book review … Ian Stevenson’s “Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation”: An Historical Review and Assessment (Journal of Scientific Exploration: 2011)
As of 1990, Stevenson’s research had received little attention from academia (see Matlock, 1990b). Since that date, it has been addressed by several philosophers, who have raised the level of discourse on the subject considerably. Angel (1994b) limits himself to the case of Imad Elawar, but Almeder (1992), Becker (1993), Paterson (1995), Edwards (1996), Griffin (1997), Braude (2003), Grosso (2004), and Lund (2009) treat Stevenson’s work generally. Edwards, a humanist, ridicules much of the data. Almeder, as already noted, is convinced. The others fall somewhere in between. Most contrast reincarnation with super-psi and psycho-cultural explanations. Griffin, Becker, Lund, Paterson, and Grosso lean toward reincarnation, but Braude favors super-psi.
Stevenson had high hopes for, his massive two-volume examination of birthmarks and birth defects (1997a, 1997b). This “medical monograph” includes detailed reports of 225 cases, together with supporting photographs and citations from autopsy reports, and he was very disheartened when it was met with silence. Edelstein (2008) suggests that this non-reaction was due in part to Stevenson having done little to show how reincarnation could be integrated with biology. His psychophore concept was not well-enough articulated to serve the purpose. I agree with this, but I think there may be other large obstacles also. One is Stevenson’s steadfastly parapsychological presentation. He was very much a psychical researcher of the old school and was not good at communicating with scientists of other disciplines, despite his many publications in mainstream journals. Another part of the problem may lie with the word reincarnation.
Do the cases Stevenson studied suggest or support reincarnation? Not if we define it in the Indic sense, as involving karma. If we want to say that these cases suggest reincarnation, we must be clear that we mean Animistic reincarnation, and we would do well to point out that the evidence we have suggests that it occurs most often in the same community or region and that there typically are very few years between lives.
There is no hint in the spontaneous cases of past lives centuries before in distant foreign lands, as was commonly envisaged before 1960. Nor is there much evidence of past lives spent as animals, as is allowed under Hinduism and Buddhism (and in some societies with animistic beliefs). In other words, we must distinguish an empirically based, scientific understanding of reincarnation from a religious or occult one. We may also want to follow McTaggart’s lead and come up with a new name for the process.
Stevenson’s most important legacy arguably lies in making reincarnation a problem for science, not merely religion and philosophy, but we must now take the next steps. It is good to show that reincarnation is logically coherent and that it makes better sense of the data than other theories do, but until we can demonstrate its relation to established concepts in biology and psychology, we will not have advanced much beyond where we were in 1960, as far as the majority of scientists are concerned.
