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WillowOne's Positions

Reincarnation and Karma

My Positions

  1. There is no good reason to believe that any part of a person survives death to be born again, and I do not hold that it does.
  2. Karma, understood as a cosmic moral ledger that settles accounts across lifetimes, is unfalsifiable, and as an explanation of suffering it is morally ugly: it blames the victim.
  3. Karma in the ordinary, non-cosmic sense (actions have consequences, and people remember how you treated them) is true, trivial, and needs no metaphysics.

Notes

  1. It requires a soul. Something must travel from one body to the next, and that something fails for the reasons given under Souls. Reincarnation adds a further problem of its own: what is reborn carries no memories, no personality and no body. It is hard to see in what sense that is you rather than a new person who has been assigned your debts. See the Ship of Theseus.
  2. The evidence. The best-known body of evidence is Ian Stevenson's collection of some 2,500 "cases suggestive of reincarnation", mostly children who claimed memories of a previous life. The cases cluster overwhelmingly in cultures that already believe in reincarnation, were typically recorded after the family had identified the "previous personality" and the two families had met, had no controls, and depended on the memories of interested adults. Stevenson himself did not claim they were proof. Past-life regression under hypnosis reliably produces confabulation; the famous Bridey Murphy case of 1952 was traced to the childhood memories of an Irish neighbour (cryptomnesia). Nobody has ever recalled a verifiable fact that they could not have learned by ordinary means.
  3. The population problem. There are around eight billion people alive now and there were perhaps a few million twenty thousand years ago. Where did the new souls come from? The answers on offer (animal souls promoted, souls from other worlds, souls created to order) are ad hoc, invented to save the theory (Special Pleading).
  4. Karma is unfalsifiable. Every outcome confirms it: good fortune is past merit, misfortune is past sin, and where the sin cannot be found it is assigned to a life nobody can check. A theory that fits every observation forbids nothing (Popper's Razor).
  5. Karma is a theodicy, and it fails like the others. It exists to answer the question the problem of evil asks: why do the innocent suffer? Its answer is that nobody is innocent; the child with leukaemia and the villager under the landslide earned what they got in a life they cannot remember. This has been used, and is still used, to justify caste, to treat disability as desert, and to counsel the poor against resentment. A moral framework that makes every victim guilty is not a moral framework; it is a way of feeling comfortable about other people's suffering. Compare Hell, which is the same idea on a one-life budget.
  6. The secular residue is real but ordinary. "What goes around comes around" is a fact about reputation, reciprocity and the small size of human communities (Morality). It needs no universe keeping score, and it visibly fails whenever the wicked die rich and comfortable, which is often.

Sources

  • Stevenson, I., Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation (1966; 2nd ed. 1974)
  • Edwards, P., Reincarnation: A Critical Examination (1996)
  • Bernstein, M., The Search for Bridey Murphy (1956), and the Chicago American investigation of the same year

Also see