Skeptics' Simplistic Dismissals of Children Who Remember Past Lives

Such is Stevenson’s reputation for scientific objectivity and impartiality that I have been able to locate very little direct criticism of his work and methods. Perhaps many skeptics have found, when they made the effort to study his research properly, that he had already considered the materialistic alternative explanations for his cases in great detail, both individually and collectively.

Having said that, there will always be plenty of skeptics whose views are so entrenched that they refuse to take the time to study the considerable evidence collated by Stevenson. This does not, however, prevent them from picking on easier targets. We have already seen how, for example, Paul Kurtz was prepared to deliver an opinion for ABC News that James Leininger’s parents were responsible for his memories by imposing a fantasy of their own making upon him, even though one suspects that he made no effort to study the case properly and meet the people involved. This despite the fact that he is professor emeritus of philosophy at the State University of New York, and the founder and chairman of the highly skeptical Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, or CSICOP. This all sounds very impressive. But do CSICOP’s professional standards even begin to approach those of someone like Stevenson? It appears not.

Which leads us nicely onto Richard Wiseman, a former professional magician turned psychologist from the University of Hertfordshire in the UK, who is also a member of CSICOP – as is Susan Blackmore who we met in the last chapter. It will therefore come as no surprise that he has consistently appeared in the media to debunk supposedly paranormal phenomena. Of particular relevance here is his involvement in a documentary aired on both the Learning and Discovery Channels in 2003, entitled Past Lives: Stories of Reincarnation, in which he is shown conducting an experiment where he asked young children simply to make up an imaginary friend, and to describe the things that happened to them. I have been unable to locate any published results for this experiment despite spending some time searching the internet, but one example of a three-year-old girl called Molly is used in the documentary. She came up with a description of another child, called Katy, who was also three. Molly said she had red hair, blue eyes, and was wearing a pink dress with flowers on it when she ran away. This is the relevant excerpt from the experiment:

Wiseman then tried to see if he could find a match for this story by looking through newspaper archives for children that had been abducted and killed, and managed to find one in which he says thirteen of the seventeen statements made by Molly were verified. Triumphantly, he proclaims he has proved that all such cases are based merely on imagination and pure chance: ‘If Molly were claiming to have lived before, this would be the reincarnation case of the decade.’

Apart from Wiseman’s massive exaggeration that clearly displays his ignorance of the depth of evidence available, was this a valid experiment? We can see that he deliberately led her down a negative or ‘bad’ route by his emphasis in his opening question. This is hardly objective evidence that children spontaneously evoke bad memories more than good, as he claims in the program. On top of this, he is concentrating entirely upon the idea that such memories arise from imagination and by chance, and completely ignoring the far more prevalent possibility in real cases that they might have been obtained by normal means. Did he check to see if Molly might have heard about the death of his ‘matched’ child from the television, or her parents? Where are the rigorous scientific controls that Stevenson himself insists upon?