(As posted at amazon.com)
I recently posted my review for the author’s another book “Immortality (1997)” (first published in 1992). Almost the same review can be applied to this book, too. But I would like to make a little different point against the author’s reasoning. These are as follows:
(1) In chap. 16 the author critically examined the reincarnation cases of Stevenson’s and he seemed to conclude that no one authentic case was established, because “they all have big holes.” His is one of the well-known patterns of arguments between skeptics and defenders over not-normal human experiences.
Long before the Stevenson’s study, a similar official record about a Japanese boy (in ca 1810) exists in Japan, which was quoted by Lafcadio Hearn in his book “Gleanings in Buddha-Fields” in 1898 (Cosimo Classics, 2004, chap. X: The Rebirth of Katsugoro). This case study about Japanese farmer’s boy, Katsugoro (9 years old when he started talking about his previous 6 year-life memory to his 15-year-old sister), was of course not conducted by a researcher of reincarnation but by Katsugoro’s grandmother of 72 years old. The local official institution entered into the inquiry only after a rumor spread over the local. Please see the book if interested in the detail.
(2) The author referred to Dr. Eugene Brody, “who published several of Stevenson’s articles in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases and who appears not to see any significant flaws in Stevenson’s investigative procedures, nevertheless refuses to accept reincarnation because it cannot be reconciled with the body of scientific knowledge.” “The problem lies less in the quality of the data Stevenson adduces,” Brody writes (in 1979), than “in the body of knowledge and theory which must be abandoned or radically modified in order to accept reincarnation.”
(3) Such a worry is not specific to the subject of “Reincarnation” alone. All the study results of the traditional Psychical Research since 1882 have been simply IGNORED all together by Scientific Community, which can be compared to an Organized Religion.
(4) Journalist and historian Brian Inglis’ (1916-1993) extensive review of the history of psychical research “Science and Parascience: A history of the paranormal, 1914-1939” was published in 1984. He criticized the systematic neglect of psychical research by scientific community in chap. 10 of the book. There is a physicist’s excuse of this act of neglect, saying “Unexplained cases are simply unexplained. They can never constitute evidence for any hypothesis” (as quoted in Martin Gardner’s Science: Good, Bad and Bogus and Weird Water and Fuzzy Logic).
(5) However, the act of ignoring scientific facts surrounding paranormal phenomena, including Reincarnation, may be similar to the act of ignoring “systematic errors” in scientific experiments, and, in my opinion, the systematic neglect has been conducted intentionally without realizing, or with realizing the threat of, their possible impacts on successful science. Just as Eugene Brody says above (2), the problem lies in the body of knowledge and theory which must be abandoned or radically modified in order to accept psychical research or reincarnation. And the theories to be abandoned are, in my opinion, (a) the Big Bang theory for the origin of our material world (because of the materialization phenomenon in psychical research instead of pair productions of particle & antiparticle) and (b) the Darwinian theory of Evolution for the origin of human species (because of the living human-form materialization phenomenon in psychical research instead of yet-to-be-explained accidental origin of life on earth & Darwinian evolution all the way up to human species with ego-directed consciousness).
(6) The author referred in chap. 17: The Dependence of Consciousness on the Brain, to Stevenson’s writing: “What we know of brains cannot explain consciousness. It would be more fitting to acknowledge the primacy of consciousness itself. We all experience it, and all our knowledge occurs in it.”
(7) I would like to close this review (or rather counter opinion to the author Paul Edwards), quoting certain psychical knowledge, which tell us “Consciousness and matter and energy are one, but consciousness INITIATES the transformation of energy into matter” [i.e., not the other way around], and this is what Stevenson mentioned in (6) above. [Ref: Jane Roberts (1997). Dreams, “Evolution,” and Value Fulfillment, Vol. 1 (New Ed.), pp. 120-121. San Rafael, CA: Amber-Allen Publishing. Originally published in 1988, c1986; Prentice-Hall.]