I was born again at seventeen, in 1980. I have spent the decades since asking whether what I believe holds up when I test it. I do not want a faith that avoids questions. I also do not want a worldview that rules out answers before it looks at the evidence. That is why Robert Almeder's reply to Steven Hales interests me. Both men claim to follow the evidence. Neither reaches where I do.

Three starting points

Almeder starts with empirical possibility. In "On Reincarnation: A Reply to Hales," he argues that reincarnation is a testable hypothesis and that the strongest cases would confirm a basic form of Cartesian dualism.

Hales starts with underdetermination. As Almeder reports him, Hales holds that physicalism is the best theory of mind and that even granting the case data does not justify belief in reincarnation. He offers an extraterrestrial story to show that the same evidence could fit another explanation.

I start with Scripture, then I apply logic and philosophical consistency. Almeder asks whether evidence can establish reincarnation. Hales asks whether that evidence points only to reincarnation. I ask whether the conclusion fits what God has said about death, judgment, and resurrection. Below I weigh each man's position by three standards: logic, philosophy, and the biblical text.

What I share with Almeder

Almeder makes two points I accept.

First, an explanation does not need a mechanism to be legitimate. He cites twin studies on schizophrenia. Researchers inferred a genetic or metabolic cause before anyone found a gene (pp. 349-350). I use the same principle when I defend Scripture. I can establish that something happened without being able to explain how God did it.

Second, a ruling theory must not be immune to contrary evidence. Almeder warns that if the paradigm cannot be challenged by anything inconsistent with it, then it is true by definition (pp. 355-356). I have watched naturalism do exactly that. Some people treat it as a rule of inquiry, then present the results of that rule as discoveries. That is circular, and Almeder is right to say so.

I also agree that a person is more than a body, though not in Descartes's sense, as I explain below. On that point Almeder and I stand closer to each other than either of us stands to Hales.

What I share with Hales

Hales is right about one thing, and it is a matter of logic.

Almeder's case runs like this: if reincarnation were true, we would see verified memories of a prior life; we do see them; therefore reincarnation is true. Read as a deductive argument, that affirms the consequent and fails whenever another explanation would produce the same observation. Almeder presents it as an inference to the best explanation, which is the fairer reading. He lists conditions the explanation must meet, including that there be no equally plausible and non-arbitrary alternative (p. 350). That kind of inference is only as strong as the rivals it has defeated. But he spends his effort on one rival, Hales's extraterrestrials, and leaves the ordinary ones alone.

Hales does not need aliens to be real. As I read the exchange, his story is a device. It shows that the pattern of evidence does not by itself pick out reincarnation. That point stands.

Hales is also right that prior probability is not dogma. A claim that conflicts with a large body of well-confirmed knowledge starts with a burden. Strong evidence can meet that burden. Calling the burden "dogmatic" does not remove it.

Where I part from both

Hales starts from physicalism as his default. I do not. Genesis 2:7 says God formed man from the dust and man became a living soul. I read Genesis 2:7 as showing man created as a unified whole. Scripture treats a human being as more than matter. A theory that begins by excluding that does not weigh the evidence fairly. It sets the answer in advance.

Almeder treats the strongest cases as sound without showing it. He also treats his conclusion as if it followed from his premises. It does not. His chain needs five steps:

A subject reports information tied to a deceased person.

The information is accurate and independently verified.

Ordinary explanations cannot account for it.

The subject is numerically the same person as the deceased.

That sameness shows an immaterial substance survives.

Each step needs its own proof. Having another person's memories is not being that person.

I have taken enough statements in my career to know how a story gets shaped by the people who tell it and the people who collect it. Testimony recorded after the fact, in a culture that already expects the answer, needs hard scrutiny before anyone builds a metaphysics on it.

I would begin with four investigative questions:

Were the statements recorded before the deceased person was identified?

Were the reported facts independently verified?

Could ordinary channels explain how the subject acquired the information?

Were investigators exposed to confirmation bias?

These questions do not prove fraud or dismiss every case. They set the standard of scrutiny the claims require.

What Scripture says, and what it only permits

I try to separate what the text says from what it merely allows, and what I conclude from it. Claims that go beyond the written text are speculation. That rule applies to me as much as to anyone.

Scripture says these things plainly.

Hebrews 9:27 states, "it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment." The verses around it add that Christ was "once offered to bear the sins of many" (Hebrews 9:26-28). One death for man, one offering for sin. The text does not describe a cycle.

Acts 24:15 speaks of "a resurrection of the dead, both of the just and unjust." Ecclesiastes 12:7 says the dust returns to the earth and "the spirit shall return unto God who gave it." Paul describes being "absent from the body" as being "present with the Lord" (2 Corinthians 5:8), and in 1 Corinthians 15 he rests the Christian hope on the resurrection, not on rebirth.

Some point to John the Baptist and Elijah. But John said he was not Elijah (John 1:21), and the angel said John would go "in the spirit and power of Elias" (Luke 1:17). That describes a ministry and a calling. It does not describe a returned soul.

Here is what I conclude from the text, and I mark it as a conclusion. In Luke 16, in Jesus' account of the rich man and Lazarus, a great gulf is fixed between the two sides of death, and Abraham says that even one risen from the dead would not persuade those who reject Moses and the prophets (Luke 16:26, 31). The passage does not mention reincarnation. Some read it as a parable, and I do not build a doctrine of the afterlife on it alone. I draw on it as consistent with Hebrews 9:27 and Ecclesiastes 12:7, which speak more directly.

So Scripture teaches that man faces death and judgment, and it places the Christian hope in resurrection rather than reincarnation. I conclude from those texts that reincarnation cannot stand as a doctrine. That is a conclusion drawn from what the text says, not a verse that names reincarnation. It does not settle how to classify a given child's accurate statements.

The text warns against seeking the dead (Deuteronomy 18:10-12), tells us to "try the spirits" (1 John 4:1), and says Satan can appear as "an angel of light" (2 Corinthians 11:14). That permits the possibility of deception. It does not require me to say any case is deception, and I will not say what Scripture does not say. The honest first step is the ordinary explanations: leakage, suggestion, cryptomnesia, reconstruction, and fraud.

If I reach for an unseen agent, I meet the same problem I raise against Hales's aliens. Neither can be observed, and neither is supported by evidence in the cases themselves. I treat a deceiving spirit as permitted, not required, and I would put it last.

Almeder's dualism is not mine

Almeder argues for Cartesian dualism. I do not hold it, and I am not a materialist either. I affirm that a human being is more than a body. Scripture speaks of body and spirit, and it says believers who die are present with the Lord (2 Corinthians 5:8). I do not claim to know more about that intermediate state than the text tells me.

What I reject is Descartes's particular framework. Descartes distinguished res cogitans, the thinking thing, from res extensa, the extended thing. He treated mind and body as separate substances, with the mind as the essence of the person and the body as something the mind occupies. The biblical hope does not read that way. Its hope is the resurrection of the body, not an escape from it. And a surviving mind that moves into a new body, as reincarnation proposes, is further still from that hope.

So if Almeder's evidence were ever established, it would not vindicate my view of the person. It would raise a new problem for it.

The three tests applied

By logic: Almeder's argument is an inference to the best explanation, and it is only as strong as the rivals it has defeated. He addresses one. Hales argues validly that evidence underdetermines, but that does not make physicalism true.

By philosophy: Almeder's reply to the reductio shows that empiricism and dualism can coexist (p. 358). It does not say how much evidence would overturn a well-confirmed paradigm. Hales's physicalism is a starting assumption, not a result.

By Scripture: it speaks directly to death and judgment (Hebrews 9:27) and places the hope in resurrection (Acts 24:15; 1 Corinthians 15). The exclusion of reincarnation follows from those texts. It does not tell me how to classify each claimed case, so I do not pretend it does.

Where this leaves me

I do not reject Almeder because he challenges the ruling theory. I reject his conclusion because his evidence has not earned it and his picture of the person does not match mine. I do not accept Hales's physicalism either. I take from him a discipline: do not mistake a fit between a theory and a pattern for proof.

Scripture tells me to "prove all things; hold fast that which is good" (1 Thessalonians 5:21). That cuts both ways. It means I may not wave away unusual evidence. It also means I may not build on it until it is proved.

The hope I hold is not another earthly life. It is the resurrection of the dead.

Source: Robert Almeder, "On Reincarnation: A Reply to Hales," Philosophia 28, nos. 1-4 (2001): 347-358. Scripture quotations are from the King James Version.

Copyright 2026 Charles Mason. All rights reserved.