The Case for Reincarnation | Evidence & Implications

I’ve never thought much of reincarnation because it seemed to undermine the purpose of faith: an afterlife.

We want to believe in an afterlife because it’s hard to imagine not existing again and because we’d like to reunite with our lost loved ones.

The idea that our spirit would keep returning to Earth with our memories wiped clean seemed to me to require an additional leap of logic than atheism without the benefits of theism.

I also dislike the notion that if we’re bad we reincarnate into a worse situation as this can lead to rationalized oppression as we see in India with the “untouchables.”

But in the past few months, I’ve started to really reconsider my views on reincarnation (or I should say “consider” because heretofore I put very little thought into the topic besides the aforementioned).

At this point, I’ve read hundreds of testimonials about children claiming to have remembered a past life!

This phenomenon is well documented throughout time and culture so there’s definitely something going on here beyond, “They’re all lying!”

Let’s take a look at some of the most famous reincarnation cases featured in the docu-series Surviving Death…

The documentary begins with Dr. Jim Tucker going to a single mother’s house (mathematically one parent is less credible than two) to ask some questions about her son Atlas who is supposedly the reincarnation of Jaylen Robinson.

Dr. Tucker asked the child to identify his previous mother by holding up two photos. Without hesitation, Atlas pointed to Mrs. Robinson. Dr. Tucker did this with four other subjects (father, home, playground, etc) whereby Atlas was able to point to 5-out-of-5 correctly, which if chosen randomly the odds of that would be 3%.

But the documentary glosses over the fact that Jaylen Robinson’s murder was covered in a 2005 New York Times article! In the documentary, the mother doesn’t mention if she had read it, but instead, claims to have eventually learned about Jaylen Robinson from an obituary.

What are the odds that a child recalls their previous life’s full name, which just so happened to be publicly available in a…