Is Science of the Afterlife an Oxymoron?

In the West we worship science but love to dabble in the spiritual realm. We practice yoga and we seek out exotic spa treatments that spring from the sacred. We are fence sitters.

I just started reading a perfectly fabulous book called Spook, by Mary Roach. It and her previous book, called Stiff are both New York Times best sellers. While Stiff is a historical exploration of the human body and man’s weird postmordem adventures poking around in it, in Spook, Roach tackles the science of the afterlife.

Spook is filled with chapter titles like How to Weigh a Soul—something, I was fascinated to learn, has been an obsession through the ages for many a man of science. It’s a hoot to read about the lengths these earnest scientists have gone to get to the bottom of what happens after we die—with experiments that involve putting TB patients on the cusp of death on a scale to see if there is a drop in weight at the moment of death. A weight loss, they surmised, would indicate the soul has left the premises. But I also find the fact that these people consider it unacceptable that some things are unknowable kind of sad. I mean, really, why in the world would a soul, which has no matter, have weight?

Another chapter takes a look at reincarnation. Roach doesn’t hide her skepticism as she tromps around India with a reincarnation researcher whose life’s work is collecting copious data on people who claim to have reincarnated into another individual. More specifically, these are little children two- three- and four- year olds who spout intricate details about the dead individuals, details that only the dead person or his or her family would know.

In these case studies, the children, display remarkable “clairvoyant” abilities to, for example, “see” the spirits of dead relatives. The kids stop having abilities and visions at about five. Hmmm. Or could it be that by five kids know enough about flighty adults to wise up and shut up around them?

The Indian man Roach travels with is Dr. Kirti S. Rawat, a colleague of an American scientist named Dr. Ian Stevenson, a University of West Virginia professor on the paranormal. But that's an understatement. Stevenson, who died this year, has studied children for some 30 years and actually has the respect and attention of the scientific community. He has written case studies in academic publications such as JAMA, the basis of which is that souls often hop from body to body in families, so that a father, who passed last year, say, can now reside in the body of a daughter who was born this year. When that girl is old enough to speak she talks about her past life. Carol Bowman has picked up Stevenson’s work and has written widely on the subject as well, which began when one of her own children exhibited past-life memories.

What I found most interesting in all this is that in India, where reincarnation is accepted, there are loads of case studies, but it’s a lot rarer here in the West.