Coosa, you have my apologies also for my excursion into proper and improper epistemology in controverted questions such as this, which gave rise, from my examples, to the “does God exist” hijack you’re upset by.
It was my intention in my examples to say that (IMO) skeptics often treat emotional-investment issues, such as reincarnation and the presence/absence of a god, in a manner that precludes rational discussion of their validity – by presuming a conceptual universe that provides prima facie evidence of their absence.
To put it in a less emotionally charged context, there are those who would argue against the hypothetical existence of tachyons by the fiat statement that “nothing can go faster than light.” Since tachyons are by definition particles moving faster than light, they therefore are logically eliminated from any conceivable existence. (This assumption is fraudulent because the actual physical law, requiring a bit of Einsteinan physics and the use of limits theory to state fully, can be summarized as “no particle can be accelerated from a speed slower than light past light speed.” Since all known mass-bearing particles move slower than light and all massless particles are constrained to move at lightspeed, nothing observable can move faster than light. However, this theory says nothing about non-observable particles that might move faster than light. (There is a rather subtle demonstration that if tachyons existed, they would induce observable reactions other than what has in fact been observed; do a search for “tachyons,” in GQ IIRC, with time set to “any date,” if you’re interested.)
David B. answered my challenges to what I felt to be unwarranted epistemological assumptions quite thoroughly and from a skeptical standpoint. But the damage was done.
If I may explore the question of the validity of past-life memories at a bit more depth, it seems that Occam’s Razor makes improbable the majority of such reports, since confabulation, desire to please authority, erroneousness of memory, and such do indeed exist, and in the minds of skeptics do provide an adequate explanation of evidence suggestive of memory of past life experiences.
Note however that this speaks of probability, not of (dis)proof. And it is quite possible that immured in the mass of wish fulfillment fantasies, confabulated memories, and such, there are actual cases of recall of past lives. What the skeptics among us are saying is that this possibility strikes them as about as likely as the assertion that there are occasionally fairies dancing in Uncle Beer’s garden – the effort to locate any possible wheat from the chaff and produce valid evidence for such recall is the onus of those who allege it, not of the investigative skeptics.
That said, the one such claim I have personally came into contact with that impressed me as valid was that of a woman who believed herself to have been Nefertiti ( ::: notes groans from skeptical and unconvinced contingent; smiles ::: ) and who was able to draw me a floor plan of a palace in Akhenaten which had not yet been excavated and which was in fact excavated between five and ten years later – and matched her floor plan. Thirty years later, I am forced to accept her belief as having some supportive evidence, although the vicissitudes of life, including about a dozen moves, have long since done away with that floor plan sketch, which was in any event undated – meaning that the sole support for this anecdote is my own memory of the conversation and allegation that I did indeed in the past have such a floorplan sketch. (FWIW, her facial features did resemble to a significant degree the famous Polychrome Bust, though not the Amarna period wall paintings.)
As was noted above, the overwhelming majority of such claimed recalls are of having been someone whom an assumption of wish-fulfillment fantasy could explain as a romantic fantasy or a wish to be of historical significance. Hence the idea that she might have been the reincarnation of Nefertiti, rather than a proto-Chibcha Indian of no historical significance, is something to employ extreme skepticism on. But AFAIAC there is some unfakeable evidence supporting her allegation.
On that, I’ll end this rather long and meandering post.
