TOK IB IA presentation. On what basis do spiritual beliefs rest? I have read about famous examples of scientific proofs of re-incarnation, the most famous being that by Dr. Ian Stevenson.

Authors Avatar

Discussion/Interview: On what basis do spiritual beliefs rest?

Boy 1: Do you believe in re-incarnation?

Boy 2: What is that?

Boy 1: It is a rather popular belief in two of the world’s biggest religions: Hinduism and Buddhism. It is believed that one’s being or soul is re-born in different bodies through a cycle of many lives. Experiences and knowledge seem to be carried over life after life until one arrives at the ‘last life’ where one enters the ‘enlightened’ state of ‘Complete wisdom’.

Boy 2: Sounds interesting! I have read about famous examples of scientific proofs of re-incarnation, the most famous being that by Dr. Ian Stevenson. Instead of relying on hypnosis to verify that an individual has had a previous life, he instead chose to collect thousands of cases of children who spontaneously (without hypnosis) remember a past life. Dr. Ian Stevenson uses this approach because spontaneous past life memories in a child can be investigated using strict scientific protocols. Hypnosis, while useful in researching into past lives, is less reliable from a purely scientific perspective.

In order to collect his data, Dr. Stevenson methodically documents the child's statements of a previous life. Then he identifies the deceased person the child remembers being with, and verifies the facts of the deceased person's life that match the child's memory. He even matches birthmarks and birth defects to wounds and scars on the deceased, verified by medical records. His strict methods systematically rule out all possible "normal" explanations for the child’s memories.

Boy 1: I am still skeptical about that. I think it is just man’s desire for immortality that gets expressed, rather strongly, as this spiritual belief of ‘Re-incarnation’.

Boy 2: Before, you go too far in assuming that as a possibility, please look at a video featuring Dr. Ian Stevenson’s colleague Dr. Jim Tucker who has furthered Stevenson’s research by looking at the memories in many young children all over the world.

Join now!

  

Boy 1: All this looks interesting but there is chance that a big chunk of these 3000 cases just might be frauds or cases where children are lying etc. These fraudulent cases should be considered as statistical outliers and shouldn’t even be counted in the data set of the experiment.

Boy 2: That’s a good point but when you do look at the remaining cases that are not frauds, the cases are so strong and so ‘unlike’ and ‘dissimilar’ to the fraudulent ones that you can’t just throw the whole data set as statistically deviant.

Boy 1: ...

This is a preview of the whole essay