Reincarnation is a Hindu and Buddhist concept that the New Age has spread to the Western Christian world. The fragile and often inconsistent way of thinking of today’s man, fascinated by the possibility of having seven lives, like a cat, has uncritically assimilated this concept. It is common to find Christians who believe in both resurrection and reincarnation, without realizing that the two concepts are mutually exclusive.
Like everything that is authentically human, faith will always escape the magnifying glass of the scientific method of knowledge; man is not an object of science. However, in order not to degrade into pure superstition, faith must be married to reason. Superstition is irrational, faith, while not rational, is at least reasonable, plausible, and must make sense. Let us put both concepts to the test of reason:
Reincarnation – As in Greek philosophy, for Easterners the soul is eternal, it existed before and is independent of the body it embodies. In an ascending process towards perfection, each life, each body, that the soul incarnates is an opportunity to progress towards perfection, successively incarnating in higher and increasingly more perfect forms of life. Contrastingly, when the soul misbehaves, it regresses, or it reincarnates in the next life in a lower form of existence, which can even be an animal, a cow for example.
Astronomy – Reincarnation seems to assume that the world has always existed and will always exist; but current astronomy says that the world came into existence with a Big Bang and will cease to exist one day, when the universe has used up all of its energy.
Demographics – For reincarnation to be possible, it assumes a planet with the same population throughout time. Demographics tells us that man began inhabiting this planet 5 million years ago; it is estimated that the world population at the time of Jesus was 300 million people, now we are at 7 billion.
Evolution of Species – Life started with a unicellular organism that diversified and progressed to ever higher and more intelligent species until it reached the human being. The science of evolution of species does not acknowledge any regression. Between us and animals, there are millions of years of evolution that cannot be reversed.
Genetics – The combination of genes in the genetic code of each living being is unique and exclusive in the life history of this planet; part of human dignity is due to this fact. It makes no sense for a soul to have a genetic code for each life it lives, nor does it make sense for several bodies of the same soul to have the same genetic code.
Regression – How then do we explain certain therapies that lead people to regress and learn what they were in another life and what type of person they were? If there is any truth to this phenomenon, it could be explained by the notion of "collective unconsciousness", proposed by Carl Jung, a follower of Freud.
People would not therefore regress to other lives they have had, but rather, through meditation and regression techniques, they would connect to psychic materials that do not come from personal experience but are found in what Jung calls the “collective unconsciousness”; this is a kind of database of the inheritance and heritage of all humanity, which contains everything that human beings are and have done throughout human history.
Resurrection – This concept owes no satisfaction or explanation to any of the sciences described above, because it is not in conflict with any of them. In the Judaeo-Christian thinking, the soul is not eternal and is intrinsically and forever united to a body; there are no bodies without souls, nor souls without bodies.
By God’s grace, every human being is naturally a candidate for eternal life, his or her entire being, body and soul transformed into an immortal form of existence, that is, the spiritual body or glorious body (1Cor 15:42-44). Those who respond negatively to God’s grace, denying it in their lives and living with their backs to God, are probably making themselves candidates for eternal death, that is, a return to the nothingness from which God created everything.
Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC
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