Nobody has proved that a soul exists, and nobody has proved that it does not. Science can measure brains, behaviour and memory, but a soul, as most traditions define it, is something beyond the physical, which puts it outside what a laboratory can settle. What people can do is weigh evidence and arguments. One of the most discussed bodies of evidence is the work of psychiatrist Ian Stevenson, who spent four decades collecting cases of young children who seemed to remember previous lives.
The writer Steven Bancarz, of the site Spirit Science and Metaphysics, argued in 2014 that these cases end the debate in favour of the soul. They do not end it, but they are genuinely intriguing, and they deserve a fair look: what was found, how it was received, what critics objected to, and where that leaves the old question.
What would count as evidence for a soul?
Most of what we believe, we believe without strict proof. We take an umbrella when rain is forecast at 70 percent, and we accept many things because several independent clues point the same way. Philosophers call this inference to the best explanation, or abductive reasoning: when a body of observations is hard to explain any other way, the explanation that fits best earns provisional belief.
Bancarz's case rested on that kind of reasoning. If memories, personality traits and even physical marks could pass from a person who died to a child born later, the simplest explanation might be that something non-physical carries them across. Near-death and out-of-body experiences are often cited in the same breath. The question is whether the observations are really as strong, and as hard to explain, as claimed.
Ian Stevenson and the University of Virginia cases
Ian Stevenson (1918 to 2007) was a Canadian-born psychiatrist who chaired the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Virginia from 1957 to 1967. With funding from Chester Carlson, the inventor of xerography, he set up a separate research unit, now the Division of Perceptual Studies, and devoted the rest of his career to unusual experiences.
Over roughly forty years he and his colleagues gathered around 3,000 cases, mostly of young children who began to talk about another life: a different name, a different family, a different village, and frequently a violent death. His best-known book, Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation, appeared in 1966. After he retired in 2002, child psychiatrist Jim B. Tucker took over the work, focusing more on American children.
The most striking claims
Birthmarks that seemed to match wounds
Stevenson's most unusual project concerned physical marks. In a 1993 paper and the larger 1997 work Reincarnation and Biology, he described around 200 children whose birthmarks or birth defects, often rare types such as missing fingers or puckered hairless patches, were said to match wounds on the person the child claimed to have been. He reported that in 43 of 49 cases where a medical document such as an autopsy report was found, it confirmed the match.
Specific memories and recognitions
In his strongest cases, children named people, places and possessions that investigators later linked to a particular deceased person. Some were said to recognise former relatives and describe relationships with them; one Lebanese girl was credited with identifying some 25 people. Stevenson concluded in several reports that he had ruled out normal ways the information could have reached the child, though he was careful to call reincarnation the best explanation for the stronger cases rather than a proven fact.
Fears linked to the remembered death
Many children showed phobias connected to how the previous person had died. Tucker has described a Sri Lankan girl who fought bath time fiercely as a baby and was terrified of buses, and who later described the life of a girl from another village who had stepped back from a passing bus into a flooded field and drowned. In a series of 387 cases, Stevenson reported such fears in about a third of the children.
Cases closer to home
Tucker has also presented American cases, where cultural belief in rebirth is less common. One frequently retold story involves a Vermont toddler, Sam Taylor, born about eighteen months after his grandfather died, who reportedly told his mother while having his nappy changed that he used to change hers, and who later picked his grandfather out of an old class photograph. The ABC News segment below covers another widely publicised American case of a young boy's apparent past-life memories.
How the research was received
Stevenson's work was unusual for a parapsychologist because it was reviewed in mainstream medical journals. In a 1975 review in JAMA, Lester S. King wrote that Stevenson "may not convince skeptics, but he has placed on record a large amount of data that cannot be ignored." Reviewers in the American Journal of Psychiatry also praised the care of his protocols, and he published in journals such as the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease.
Even admirers, however, mostly praised his diligence rather than accepting his conclusion. Respect for a careful investigator is not the same as agreement that reincarnation happened, and that gap is important when the research is described as settling anything.
What critics pointed out
The objections fall into a few groups, and several come from people who took the cases seriously.
- How the interviews were done. Champe Ransom, who worked as Stevenson's assistant in the 1970s, wrote an internal report noting leading questions, long delays between a child's statements and the interviews, and gaps filled in afterwards. The philosopher Leonard Angel made similar complaints in Skeptical Inquirer.
- Contact between families. In many cases the two families had some prior connection, or had met before details were written down, which makes it hard to rule out the child picking up information normally.
- Culture and expectation. Most cases came from places where rebirth is widely believed, such as India, Sri Lanka, Lebanon and Myanmar. Critics argue that adults there may unconsciously shape a child's fantasies into a past-life story.
- Seeing patterns. Michael Shermer and Leonard Angel argued that people naturally find matches between a child's vague statements or a birthmark and someone's life, then forget the misses.
- No mechanism. Paul Edwards, Stevenson's chief critic, argued that there is no plausible way for memories or wound marks to travel from one body to another. Stevenson himself acknowledged that no physical process had been identified.
Supporters such as the researcher James Matlock reply that many critics repeat one another without checking the original case files, and that fraud has rarely been demonstrated. The debate continues, but outside parapsychology the cases have not been accepted as evidence of reincarnation.
Where this leaves the question of the soul
Even if some children really did know things they could not have learned, reincarnation is only one possible explanation. Some parapsychologists prefer theories involving telepathy among the living; most scientists favour ordinary explanations such as memory errors, coaching and coincidence. And even if rebirth happened, the step to a particular idea of the soul would still be an interpretation, not an observation.
Stevenson's own wording was more modest than the headlines his work inspired. In 1989 he wrote that the evidence "is not flawless and it certainly does not compel such a belief." That is a fair summary for anyone reading about it today: the cases are a curious and carefully documented puzzle, worth knowing about, and the existence of a soul remains a question of philosophy and faith rather than settled science.
A line often attributed to Voltaire puts the hopeful view gracefully: it is no more surprising to be born twice than to be born once. Whether you find that persuasive is, in the end, still up to you.
Further reading
For the case for reincarnation in the researchers' own words, Stevenson's Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation and Jim B. Tucker's Life Before Life and Return to Life are the standard books. For the sceptical side, Paul Edwards's Reincarnation: A Critical Examination sets out the main objections.
Sources: Ian Stevenson, Wikipedia; Jim B. Tucker, Wikipedia; Criticisms of reincarnation case studies, Psi Encyclopedia (Society for Psychical Research); original essay by Steven Bancarz at Spirit Science and Metaphysics.
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