How to prove the theory of reincarnation with statistical experiment
15 Jun 2010Translated from http://www.geekonomics10000.com/178.The copyright belongs to the author of geekonomics10000.com.
This website is very interesting, and the author aims to “understand the world in scientific engineering ways”. I like this article very much, so I translate this into English, as a note and a practice of writing English.
How to prove the theory of reincarnation with statistical experiment
God doesn’t need any miracle to refute atheism, because his ordinary work has proved his existence. –Bacon
On the issue of arguing the existence of soul or possibility of reincarnation, it is not scientific enough if just answering “right” or “wrong”. Scientific spirit means “test”. However, individual cases of supernatural phenomena occasionally take place, which don’t hold the repeatability and thus they are not convincing. This article tries to put forward a test to prove the existence of reincarnation, according to some common knowledges on “soul”. This experiment is different from the traditional ways. Precision instrument isn’t needed, and supernatural phenomenon isn’t involved. Its essence is statistical methods. Any researcher can repeat the experiment anytime anywhere. I neither believe in God, nor dare to determine whether the soul exists or not. So, the design of this experiment is completely objective.
As the words of Bacon at the beginning, if the soul exists, it should be everywhere, so we don’t have to find out supernatural phenomena to prove existence of the soul. In a world with souls, every “new” life is not “completely new”, because his or her soul has been reincarnated for many times. And in a world without souls, every new life is totally new. If these two world have no differences, meaning that soul is not measurable, we can say that it is meaningless to ask the questions about soul, and it’s also meaningless to tell others to perform good deeds in order to enjoy a better next life (because the results are the same anyway). So, we can safely draw the conclusion that in the world with souls there should be some observable things, which help us to ensure the existence of the soul.
After reading a large number of cases of supernatural phenomena, I find a property of soul: a soul after his body’s death doesn’t leave too far. For example, a person died, and he would probably be reincarnated near his village rather than in another province. It seems that soul can’t take trains or planes, unlike living people. Let us name this characteristic “the principle of locality of the soul”.
And in fact, almost all of us agree that after reincarnation, the person should have some previous life habits, personal qualities, etc, more or less. We can name this characteristic “the principle of continuity of the soul”. It is understandable, because if there’s no connection between a soul’s two lives, we can’t do anything to change our next life.
According to “the principle of locality of the soul”, a baby’s previous body died near the baby’s birth place. If a couple, who are born and growed up in Canton, worked in Sichuan for a year, and gave birth to a baby in Sichuan, it’s of great possibility that the baby’s previous life is a citizen of Sichuan. Now suppose, the couple returned to Canton at once. Then what if the couple and their friends didn’t like spicy food at all? According to two principles, we can discover a supernatural phenomenon which is not supernatural: the child unusually loved spicy food. Unfortunately, kids loving spicy food in Canton are not considered as “unusual”. I haven’t heard of news in similar so far. It is just a hypothetical experiment.
In fact, this hypothetical experiment is not scientific enough, because of so many chances.
Real scientific experiments must be done like this:
In Henan researchers randomly select 2000 suitable couples. and randomly divide them into two groups: A and B, 1000 couples each. Before anyone’s pregnancy, they set off by the same means of transport at the same time, but to different places. Group A return to Henan, while another group are sent to Saudi Arabia. The entire process is completely closed. It is important that they should live in two buildings with the same facilities, and they shouldn’t know where they are. For example, they are told that they are in Beijing.
Two groups eat the same food from the same place every day, watch the same TV programs, and do the same things. Of course they are not allowed to walk out of the construction where they are. In short, their situations are almost the same, except their geographical coordinate.
Their purpose is giving birth. we ideally get about 2000 children two years later. Then the two groups take the completely closed, the same means of transport, and return to Henan. Then everyone live simple daily life. After proper control, everyone looks the same as other ordinary simple people.
If the existence of reincarnation is true, and “the principle of locality of the soul” is correct, we can find out an obvious inference that most of the pervious lives of 1000 children from Group A were Henan citizen, and most of the pervious lives of 1000 children from Group B came from Saudi Arabia. Few Chinese lives in Saudi Arabia, so even if souls prefer their nation, there are not enough Chinese souls in the short time.
Let’s go further. If “the principle of continuity of the soul” is right, children from Group B have a talent of Arabic, and they are likely to believe in Islam. Even further, children from Group B have faces in Saudi style. If we do observe these phenomena, then the experiment completely proves the authenticity of the reincarnation of the soul. If on the contrary, the theory of reincarnation is worthy of doubts. 1000 samples are sufficient in statistics, and experiment is reliable.
This is a perfect experiment. The only problem is the ethical problem. We are not Nazis. Any simpler solutions? We may collect cases of “kids loving spicy food in Canton”, or have a look at animals.
I once heard someone say that most of the pigs’ previous life and the next life are pigs, rather than human or deers. We can replace people with pigs, because there’s (almost) no pigs in Saudi Arabia. In other words, most of the piglets from Group B experience “the first life of being pigs”. And piglets from Group A are more “experienced”. There should be some differences between piglets from two groups.
We shouldn’t forget another possibility: the birth rate of Group B is much lower than that of Group A, mainly because of less “souls of pigs” after discharging all other possibilities.
So that we can verify the theory of reincarnation with statistical experiment.