Thursday, November 10, 2016

Reincarnation and the Bible



A four-year-old tells his family that he misses his "previous" family. He remembers living as a child in a different town with different parents and siblings as an older boy. Five years later, he sees a man that he believes is his "real" father. The man acknowledges that he had a child that died right around the time that the four-year-old was conceived. They take the boy to the man's house and he recognizes the other family members and is very emotional, crying as he sees them. This is one example of many well-documented cases supposedly demonstrating evidence of reincarnation (see Ian Steven's "Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation"). The situation described above is a true account. Does this mean that reincarnation is real?

Billions of people in Eastern religions like Hinduism believe  in reincarnation. Many others also say they believe in reincarnation, from the half-joking to the more serious. There are many reasons for doing so:

1. There is a motivation to believe. None of us want this life to be all there is. Reincarnation explains that life continues after this one. In addition, I think all of us like the concept of a "do-over." We've made mistakes in life and we want another chance to get it right. It's not hard to see how the idea of reincarnation became popular.

2. Many religious texts teach reincarnation. Reincarnation seems plausible because sources claiming a certain level of authority on truth claim that it is true. I will speak specifically about the "Bhagavad Gita" below.

3. Specific examples are given, like the one above. Sometimes these involve children knowing a foreign language that they have never heard before. Compared to the number of people in the world these examples are rare, but altogether there are many cases like this.

But how does this compare to what the Bible says? The Bible also teaches that this life is not all there is. However, the Bible does not allow for a "do-over." Hebrews 9:27 says, "Man is destined to die once, and after that to face judgment." Many accounts in the Bible emphasize that after death, our soul continues to have the same identity and continues to exist in either heaven or hell, awaiting the resurrection of the body and a final judgment. (See Also, "What About Hell?")

Both of these views cannot be true. Either reincarnation is true and the Bible is false. Or the Bible is true, and reincarnation is false. How should we decide? The more reasonable position is the one that can explain the evidence for the other. Let's look at the evidence.

1. There is a motivation to believe. Clearly, this should not matter. No matter how much we may want something to be true, that has nothing to do with whether or not it is true. However, I think there are many reasons why reincarnation is not something we should even want to be true. It fundamentally doesn't make sense.

One of the more popular Hindu texts that supports reincarnation is the Bhagavad Gita. It retells a conversation between Arjuna (a warrior leading an army into battle), and Krishna (one of the most important gods in Hinduism). Arjuna has a moral dilemma. Should he go into battle and kill many people? Krishna responds that Arjuna should go into battle. His argument does not focus on the just cause of the war, but rather on the implications of reincarnation. Essentially, he says that since Arjuna is a warrior, he is supposed to fight. The people he kills in battle will simply reincarnate and start life again in a new form. The people who die have done bad things in their life and have built up a need to suffer (karma). By killing them, Arjuna is helping to burn off their bad karma and allowing them to enter into a new life free from the bad karma. (Admittedly, this is an oversimplified explanation.)

Therefore, the implication of reincarnation is that you have to keep trying to do better and better each lifetime to reach some goal (the goal varies in different religions). But anything you do to hurt others is actually helping them burn off bad karma and anything you do to help them is causing them to expend their good karma. There is no meaningful way to do right and wrong. There is an almost hopeless cycle of going through different lives, suffering immensely, and hoping to one day escape through your own strength.

Christianity offers real hope. This life matters. You can achieve perfect righteousness right now! You receive it as a gift through faith in Jesus Christ.

2. Many religious texts teach reincarnation. Yes, but they have no supporting evidence like the Bible. We don't really know anything about who wrote the Bhagavad Gita or even when. Nor do we have any reason to think Arjuna was a real person or that the events described in the book actually happened. The only way we can evaluate the claims is to ask ourselves, "Does this seem like truth to me?" But that is not a very good method. We are simply guessing, with nothing to guide us (except for #3 below).

The Bible is a very different kind of book. It identifies the authors and places them in real places and times. People may question that the Bible is right, but you can investigate it historically, it is not simply internal guess work. In addition, the Bible is authenticated by miracles. Jesus claimed to be God and proved it by dying and rising from the dead. The Bible's verification is based on a historical event that occurred in public with many eye-witnesses. You may doubt the claims of Christianity, but it is a matter that one can study historical evidence for and against. The evidence is not based on personal, subjective feelings. (See, "How Do We Know the Bible is God's Word?") Rather, it is based on historical facts.

3. Specific examples are given, like the one above. Yes, reincarnation is an explanation for these stories, but the Bible also offers an explanation for cases like the four-year-old described above. I think the Bible offers a better explanation.

First, the Bible says that Satan blinds the eyes of unbelievers (2 Cor. 4:4). Believing that reincarnation is true is an obstacle to believing in Jesus as the hope for eternal life. Clearly, if Satan is a real being as the Bible says, he has a motive to deceive people into believing reincarnation. In fact, God tells us that this is exactly what Satan does, he acts to deceive people into believing things that conflict with the truth.

Second, Satan can use spirits, or demons, to communicate to people. In Acts 16, Paul encounters a woman who had a "spirit" and earned money as a fortune-teller. She followed Paul, shouting, "These men are servants of the Most High God." She knew things about Paul because of what a spirit was telling her.

In the case of the four-year-old boy, the Bible would say that he never had a previous life. Instead, a spirit was telling him things about a boy who lived earlier. Growing up in a Hindu home, he either interpreted the messages to be about his previous life, or he was deceived by the spirit into thinking he really used to be the former boy. This is exactly the kind of thing the Bible says Satan does, and fits with the mechanisms available to Satan.

This is a better explanation for several reasons. First, there are similar stories that reincarnation cannot explain. Ian Stevenson documents cases where the "earlier person" was still living when he supposedly reincarnated into another person. For example, suppose a case just like the four-year-old boy described above. Yet, this time, imagine that the "previous child" who died, died a year after the four-year-old was born. Many cases like this have been recorded. Reincarnation clearly cannot explain this, because it requires a person to reincarnate into another human embryo a year or more before dying. The Bible offers a better explanation for these cases. There is a demonic spirit at work. The biblical view is the only one that can explain all the evidence, not just the cherry-picked cases.

Second, notice that the Bible can explain the evidence for reincarnation with no difficulty. However, those who believe in reincarnation do not have an easy explanation for all the evidence supporting the Bible.

Third, the whole system of reincarnation is full of logical difficulties, as outlined above. Who started reincarnation? Who enforces it? How long has this been going on? What is the real goal or purpose? Many Eastern religions seem to offer creative approaches to these questions, but none offer objectively verified evidence. Christianity offers a historical person that revealed everything we need to know about God, the purpose of life, what we must do, and how we can have eternal life. The events of his life were done in public with objective evidence available for any person to examine.


Trust the Bible's purpose is to grow your confidence that the Bible is true and the ultimate resource for life." You can join the Facebook group by clicking here. Trust the Bible is a weekday radio program that begins at about 8:10 each morning on WDOG 93.5 in Allendale, SC. Listen to previous programs online: www.fairfaxfbc.org/trust-the-bible.html

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