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For thousands of years, people in various cultures have believed in reincarnation.

And in the 1950s, a Colorado housewife named Virginia Tai

underwent a series of hypnotic regressions in which she reported memories

of being an Irish woman named Brydie Murphy in the 1800s.

It set off a major sensation in American culture known as the Brydie Murphy craze.

Jimmy, what can we say about reincarnation from the reason perspective?

Evidence typically is offered in one of three forms. It could be philosophical evidence,

it could be bodily evidence, and it could be mental evidence. It would be better for reincarnation

advocates to try to prove their case by pointing to empirical evidence because the

philosophical arguments are shot through with holes without verification from the historical record.

Such memories are not to be trusted. You need verifiable details that could not be

gassed by random chance. We really need to give Mori Bernstein credit. He really wanted

this kind of investigation to be conducted, and he repeatedly asked her about things that could

be verified or falsified. As we'll see next episode, he even tried to trick her into

contradicting herself. I can't think of another case in the popular press where a reincarnation

researcher tried to make that kind of verification or falsification possible. So that makes the

Brydie Murphy experiments an unusually good test case. In our next episode, we'll look at what

the historical record says and how well what Virginia tie reported under hypnosis stacks up against it.

We will also be looking at reincarnation from the faith perspective.

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