I came across an interesting excerpt on Stephen Sakellarios site (among other things): Skepticism and debunking is something we do not talk about often here unless a skeptic brings up issues, and yet it is an interesting exercise to review their POV and ponder the pros and cons. I enjoyed reading Steve's website -some very interesting research....and I found his reflections on the issue to be 'spot on.' What do you think?
Here is a new British article about reincarnation, primarily focusing on Dr. Stevenson's work. The skeptics--and journalists always must quote a skeptic--continue to drag out the same tired argument that it would be possible to find matches for the child's statements in any city. This is nonsense. Why? Because, just for starters, the child will name the town where they lived in the past life.
Then without any assistance they will locate the house, give people's names, and describe details, including intimate details. These kinds of specific details--20, or 30, or 40--simply do not exist in any other town with people of those names. But as a fair debunker, you don't get to sift through an entire town, because in many of the best cases I've read this is not a selection process where an entire city is sifted for a matching situation. You only get to choose one house, because in these studies, the child knows exactly where he or she lived.
The odds of a child picking one house in a single town, with 30 or 40 specific memories including people's names at that house being accurate, are astronomical. So this skeptical theory evaporates when you compare it with the actual cases. The thing is, it is not poor science at all. It is excellent science, and these kinds of objections were already anticipated in the investigation design. The problem is that it's poor criticism. What the skeptics do is a version of "straw man"--they set up poor science when they test the theory and then criticize their own bad mockup, claiming they've debunked the method.
If you wanted to try to fairly debunk these findings, you would have to choose one house only (as the child does) at random in a particular town. You would have to create (in some random way which prevented unconscious use of psychic abilities), say, 30 specific imaginary details including names, and some of those details would have to be intimate details not generally known except to one or two people. These are the kinds of details that would apply only to those people, like details of a couple's sex-life, or where money was buried (actual examples from Stevenson's cases).
And then, all or most of those imaginary details including names would have to turn out to be spot-on for that one real household and the people in that household. No debunker I know of has tried this, because of course they know they would be checkmated before they started. You could probably run this fair version of the test for a thousand years and never get a match, but it would still not replicate some aspects of Stevenson's findings, like the child's emotional reactions to the past-life family, xenoglossy and birthmarks.
In order to do that, you'd have to randomly choose a young child who would turn out to be able to speak a language he had never been taught (as a debunker you're dead in the water right there), and would have birthmarks corresponding to the death wounds of a child that the family just happened to have lost in the house that you randomly selected from the one town.
He would also have to display appropriate, sincere behaviors and emotions toward the people in that randomly-selected household (it would not be easy to randomly select a very young child who could convincingly feign great joy at being reunited with total strangers, for example, no less persuade one to insist on staying with the strangers). See additional comments.