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Bruce Leininger’s “Definitive Proof” of Reincarnation

41by4EPLRnLIn November 2021 the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies awarded Bruce Leininger $20,000 for his essay “Consciousness Survives Physical Death: ‘Definitive Proof’ of Reincarnation.” In his essay, Mr. Leininger presents a chronology of behaviors and claims he attributes to his son James. The chronology spans a seven-year period beginning in 2000 shortly before James turned two years old. Mr. Leininger says his son’s behaviors and claims during this period of time match the life of World War II fighter pilot James M. Huston., Jr. who died in combat on March 3, 1945. Mr. Leininger regards these matches as otherwise inexplicable. For Mr. Leininger, this is proof that his son is the reincarnation of Huston.

This isn’t the first we’ve heard of the James Leininger story. It first came to national attention in 2004 when ABC Primetime covered the story with Chris Cuomo as the correspondent. Other US news outlets subsequently featured the story. Then in 2009 Bruce and Andrea Leininger published Soul Survivor, co-written with Ken Gross. The book chronicles the events that eventually convinced the Leiningers that their son lived a previous life as Huston.

Reincarnation researcher Jim Tucker investigated the case in 2010 and subsequently published favorable evaluations, including “The Case of James Leininger: An American Case of the Reincarnation Type” (2016). Past-life therapist Carol Bowman, who counseled the Leiningers in 2001 and wrote the foreword to their book, has also written and lectured on the case – for example in “Children’s Past Life Memories and Healing” (2010, pp. 54-58). Bowman says, “the James Leininger case is the best American case of a child’s past life memory among the thousands I’ve encountered” (“Foreward,” Soul Survivor, p. x). A favorable analysis of the case also appeared in journalist Leslie Kean’s book Surviving Death (2017). And most recently, the 2021 Netflix series Surviving Death, loosely based on Kean’s book, featured a segment on the Leiningers.

The Latest Version of the Leininger Story

In “Consciousness Survives Physical Death” (hereafter, CSD), Bruce Leininger presents the latest iteration of the reincarnation story he’s been perpetuating for nearly two decades. 

As in his earlier presentations, he focuses on two sets of alleged facts. (i) There are claims and behaviors he attributes to his son James at various points in a seven-year chronology. (ii) There’s documentation allegedly showing that these claims and behaviors match the life and death of Huston. Leininger also claims that the kinds of facts identified in (i) and (ii) have no ordinary explanation – for example, coincidence or ordinary sources of information which might have influenced his son. Mr. Leininger claims that these considerations provide definitive proof of reincarnation. He calls it a proof so “iron clad” that it carries the force a geometric demonstration.

I have previously published “The James Leininger Case Re-examined” (Journal of Scientific Exploration, 35: 4, December 2021). My JSE article provided an extensive critical discussion of this case in connection with Jim Tucker’s investigation and analysis. However, because of the timing of the publication of Leininger’s CSD paper, I was not able to provide any substantial comments on it in my JSE paper. What follows below is a supplement to my JSE paper. It’s not intended to be a comprehensive, line-by-line exegesis and critique of Leininger’s CSD paper. My goal is to illustrate from his paper the problems I discussed in my JSE paper, but with particular attention to the kind of argument Mr. Leininger claims to be offering as proof of reincarnation.

In what follows below, I have in places included links to written and photographic documentation to support my claims. In a couple of places, I embed video clips. It’s not necessary to read my JSE paper before reading this supplement, but some readers may wish to read the more extensive JSE paper first. Although there’s cross-over in content between the two, they have different though complementary objectives. 

One final preliminary. BICS published Bruce Leininger’s paper without the supporting documentation Mr. Leininger allegedly included as appendices. At present (1/17/2022), BICS has not published a corrected version of Mr. Leininger’s paper. His narrative remains without any supporting documentation. One of these important pieces of primary-source documentation is the Natoma Bay Aircraft Action Report. Since I acquired a copy of that document during my research, I have uploaded it to my website and link to it below.

Extravagant Claims

The first thing that stands out in Bruce Leininger’s essay is the extravagant nature of his main claim.

In this essay I will present ironclad proof that consciousness survives physical death via this demonstration. This body of evidence or proof was discovered over a seven-year investigation as I worked to validate statements made by my son James. (CSD, p. 3)

This essay will demonstrate an immutable proof, like a proof of Geometry, that reincarnation is a real event in the journey of the soul through eternity. (CSD, p. 5)

I have clearly and unequivocally proved reincarnation is a real event in the survival of the human consciousness after death and proof that the soul is on an eternal journey. (CSD, p. 22)

Bruce Leininger doesn’t say, as other researchers have, that reincarnation provides the best explanation of the facts. He doesn’t say his case presents good evidence for reincarnation. Mr. Leininger says he’s going to present a proof. And not just any proof. Presumably proof is even too weak of a notion to do justice to the evidential force of the facts Mr. Leininger has managed to discover. He’s going to present an ironclad and immutable proof. He’s going to provide a demonstration as logically compelling as a geometric proof. And he will not only prove postmortem survival, but the existence of a soul that will exist for eternity.

These claims are excessive and border on the absurd and outrageous. Even a modest familiarity with the literature on life after death over the last century shows how far Bruce Leininger’s thinking has strayed from the beaten path. No serious thinker in the survival debate believes we can prove there’s life after death, much less with the force of geometric demonstration. And proof of the persistence of consciousness after death would not prove the existence of a soul, much less immortality.

Stephen Braude, in his prize-winning essay in the Bigelow competition, nicely brings attention to the importance of evidential modesty. 

In order to evaluate the cases taken as evidence of postmortem survival, we must first be clear about what, exactly, we’re considering or hoping to establish. Strictly speaking, we have no proof of survival. Nor can we. We know quite well what proof amounts to in formal systems such as logic and mathematics. But empirical claims never enjoy that degree of certitude, and yet we can still have good reasons for believing many things that nevertheless remain vulnerable to possible revision or subsequent rejection. So what participants in the survival debate need to consider is something more modest than a slam-dunk proof—namely, whether there’s sufficient evidence for, and a rational basis for belief in, the survival of bodily death. (Braude, “A Rational Guide to the Best Evidence for Survival,” p. 1, 2021)

Mr. Leininger is not adequately familiar with the literature on survival to understand what the crucial issues are. Nor does he understand how participants in the survival debate have framed their arguments over the past century. He also doesn’t understand what a proof demands, or he has greatly exaggerated the evidential force of the presumed facts, and his own logical prowess. Curiously, Leininger cites Jim Tucker as a prominent researcher who has vouched for the case (CSD, p. 7), but even Tucker doesn’t make such extravagant claims. 

But Mr. Leininger’s understanding is otherwise flawed. Shortly after making the above claims, he says: “The preponderance of evidence allows for no conclusion other than reincarnation” (CSD, p. 7). Preponderance of evidence and proofs (geometric or otherwise) are very different kinds of inferences. The latter involves a necessary inference: if the premises are true, then it’s impossible for the conclusion to be false. The former involves a probabilistic inference: if the premises are true, then it’s improbable that the conclusion is false.

Preponderance of the evidence is a legal standard. In strict logical terms (minus legal caveats) it means given evidence e, some statement h has a probability greater than .50 (or 1/2). In other words, given the evidence e, h is more probable than not. Therefore, any claim established by the preponderance of the evidence is logically consistent with and thus allows other conclusions, including not-h. (And that’s true even when various legal caveats are added.) This is also true for clear and convincing evidence and proof beyond a reasonable doubt. These are also probabilistic inferences, though stronger than preponderance of the evidence.

Mr. Leininger is clearly confused about the concepts he’s recklessly brandishing.

Extracting an Argument

Another problem is that Leininger nowhere presents an actual argument for his son being the reincarnation of James Huston, Jr. I don’t mean that he doesn’t provide a logical demonstration – clearly, he doesn’t do that. I mean he presents no clear argument at all. A chronology is not an argument. A narrative is not an argument. A list of facts is not an argument. Assertions about evidence is not an argument. Then again, the failure to present a clear argument is a common problem in the literature on survival. Perhaps we shouldn’t dwell on this particular flaw. 

In the interest of charity, let’s consider what Mr. Leininger does give us in the paper. We can work from there and try to ferret out a suggested argument.

  • Mr. Leininger provides a detailed chronology in which he lists things James allegedly said and did.
  • His “chronological trail” also includes references to sources that provide alleged confirmations. For example, he references sources that document that the Leiningers had on earlier occasions attributed to James some of the same claims and behaviors Mr. Leininger attributes to him in CSD.
  • More importantly, Mr. Leininger references primary source documents about Huston. These supposedly show that what James said or did is am exact match to facts about Huston, especially the manner and circumstances of Huston’s death. For example, he says, “All of James Leininger’s (James) words and actions regarding his past life were accurate depictions of his prior incarnation” (CSD, p. 6), and “The facts never varied from or differed with anything he said about his past life” (CSD, p. 7).
  • Concerning the information James conveyed and his behaviors, they either “seemed impossible” for a child (CSD, p. 8) or “there is no way he could have known that detail unless he had been there” (CSD, p. 14). He also claims that the matches are not inexplicable by coincidence (CSD, p. 20).

Mr. Leininger’s explicit claims at least suggest an argument. 

What then is the suggested argument? Something like this:

(P1) James made the claims attributed to him in the chronology and made them at the times specified in the chronology.

(P2) James exhibited the behaviors attributed to him in the chronology and exhibited them at the times specified in the chronology.

(P3) All the claims and behaviors attributed to James in (P1) and (P2) exactly match James Huston, Jr.

(P4) It is impossible that the matches in (P3) are mere coincidences or that James acquired the information from ordinary sources.

So:

(C) James Leininger is the reincarnation of James Huston, Jr.

To reiterate, this represents my standardizing of what seems to be Mr. Leininger’s argument. He only suggests this argument. I’m simply trying to clarify the kind of reasoning he seems to be groping after based on his explicit claims. 

Defects in the Suggested Argument

Bruce Leininger’s argument is not a valid deductive argument. The premises don’t logically entail the conclusion. It’s possible for each of the premises to be true and the conclusion false. So, the argument isn’t a logical demonstration. Also, the premises, even if true, don’t have the degree of warrant that characterizes premises in a geometric demonstration. Mr. Leininger’s argument isn’t a proof of anything, much less an ironclad, immutable, and definitive one. 

Of course, we could whip the argument into a more respectable or at least less implausible form. For example, we could change the impossibility of coincidence and ordinary sources in (P4) to the improbability of coincidence and ordinary sources. And we could qualify the inference to the conclusion as a probable inference – for example, as being more probable than not. I don’t think this would make the inference a good one, but at least it wouldn’t be transparently implausible.

Regardless of whether we take the argument in the strong or more modest form, the premises are the main problem. There are compelling reasons to think the premises are false or at least that Leininger has failed to show that they are true. This is important. Whatever the exact structure of the argument he’s suggesting, it clearly includes the above claims or something close to them. So, regardless of the exact form or structure of his argument, his reasoning is flawed because it depends on unwarranted claims.

In my JSE paper I present a variety of considerations that bear on the rationality acceptability of (P1), (P2), (P3), and (P4). I argue that these claims are either false or we have insufficient reason to think they’re true. They are, therefore, unwarranted claims. And if we’re not warranted in accepting these claims, we’re not warranted in accepting the conclusion based on them. Hence, Mr. Leininger fails to offer a good argument for the claim that his son is the reincarnation of James Huston, Jr.

Let’s take a careful look at (P1), (P2), (P3), and (P4).

Premises (P1) and (P2) – The Chronology of Events

The rational acceptability of premises (P1) and (P2) depends on there being a credible chronology of events, but Bruce Leininger’s chronology of events isn’t credible. Consistency is a necessary condition for credibility, especially with respect to structural features of a narrative or claims essential to the content of the narrative. Between 2002 and 2021, Bruce Leininger has offered multiple chronologies. CSD is the latest version of an old story. These chronologies are not merely different; they are structurally and substantively inconsistent with each other. For example, they involve inconsistencies with respect to what James said and when he said it. These inconsistencies also appear to be part of a wider process of narrative redaction based on what the Leininger’s subsequently learned about Huston’s life.

My JSE paper provides a thorough examination of narrative inconsistencies prior to the publication of Leininger’s CSD. Regrettably for Leininger, CSD introduces even more inconsistencies and engages in more suspicious chronological redaction.

One glaring example of a new inconsistency concerns item (4) in Leininger’s CSD chronology.

He writes:

4) July – August [2000] – By this time James also said he flew a Corsair 

He indicated several times the Corsair wanted to turn or flip to the left when it took off and the tires broke a lot when the plane landed. (CSD: 9, emphasis mine)

According to item (4), James communicated the specified details about the Corsair (in italics) in July or August 2000. But according to Soul Survivor, James didn’t offer these specific details concerning the Corsair until May 2002

Describing the circumstances of the filming of the 2002 ABC program in May 2002, the Leiningers state the following in Soul Survivor:

[Shalini Sharma] asked him [James] to show her a picture of a Corsair. So he got out one of Bruce’s books and picked out the Corsair. “That’s a Corsair,” he said. “They used to get flat fires all the time! And they always wanted to turn to the left when they took off!” He had never said that before – never given the characteristics of the plane. (SS, p. 124, UK edition)

In CSD Leininger describes the above incident about item (18).

18) 1 May 2002Shalani Sharma 20/20 TV comes to interview us for a TV show being planned. She bought James a toy Corsair and while talking to Shalini about the plane James told her that he remembered Corsairs getting flat tires and always wanted to turn to the left when taking off. (CSD, p. 12)

Item (4) indicates James made the specific Corsair claims in summer 2000. Item (18) says he made them on May 1, 2002. However, notice what Mr. Leininger doesn’t say under (18). Unlike the account in Soul Survivor, he doesn’t say that the May 1, 2002 incident was the first time James made the specific claims about the Corsair. Given what Mr. Leininger says under item (4), that obviously can’t be the case. The narrative in CSD implies James first made these claims in summer 2000, then repeated them on May 1, 2002. If the chronology in Soul Survivor is correct, Bruce’s chronology in CSD is incorrect. If the chronology in CSD is correct, then the chronology in Soul Survivor is incorrect.

The chronological discrepancy is off by nearly two years. The discrepancy is a straightforward logical inconsistency; the accounts in SS and CSD can’t both be correct. Nor is the inconsistency innocuous. It bears on the plausibility of ordinary sources of information which might’ve influenced James. Between summer 2000 and spring 2002, James acquired information about aviation and WW2 planes from a variety of ordinary sources. By relocating these specific Corsair claims under July-August 2000, Mr. Leininger simultaneously inflates the content of what James said early in the case and limits what James could’ve been exposed to that would’ve supplied the information in a quite pedestrian manner.

Other new changes to the chronology introduced in CSD mask earlier inconsistencies.

For example, in Soul Survivor the Leiningers indicate that past-life therapist Carol Bowman got involved in the case in winter 2001, more precisely February 2001 (SS, pp. 116-117). However, in other chronologies – for example, the 2020 documentary the Great Beyond Revealed – Bruce Leininger has indicated that Bowman got involved in summer 2000, perhaps as early as July 2000. Curiously, in CSD Mr. Leininger makes no mention at all of past-life therapist Carol Bowman, though he mentions Jim Tucker. It’s as if Bowman never had anything to do with this case. This is a peculiar omission. I’ll show its evidential significance below, but it’s otherwise a striking alteration to the story given Bowman’s prominence in Soul Survivor. After all, she had a role in the story at two crucial points in its evolution, and she wrote the foreword to their book.

Other features of the CSD chronology repeat later alterations to the story.

Consider item (8).

8)  24 November 2000 – Day after Thanksgiving – IWO JIMA

While waiting for cartoons to start I was looking over a book “Battle for Iwo Jima” by Derrick Wright. I had ordered it to give to my father, a WWII veteran Marine, James was sitting on my lap looking at photos with me. Pointing to a photo of Iwo Jima he said “Daddy, that is when my plane got shot down.” Upon examining the report I found 27 August I verified the ship supported the battle of Iwo Jima..John DeWitt, the ship historian also informed me that only one man from VC-81 was killed during the Battle for Iwo Jima – James McCready Huston, Jr. (CSD, pp. 10, 13)

Although this account matches the claim the Leiningers attribute to James in Soul Survivor (SS, p. 104), compare it to Bruce Leininger’s version of the story in the 2004 ABC Primetime episode:

Chris Cuomo [narration]: “And one day while leafing through a new book about the Battle of Iwo Jima, Bruce turned to an aerial photo of the Pacific island. James was seated nearby.”

Bruce Leininger: “He pointed to it and goes, ‘Daddy, that’s where my plane was shot down.’ And I said, what? And he said, ‘My airplane got shot down there, Daddy.’ And I just went… I just went blank. I couldn’t say anything.” (Video: Unexplained Phenomena, 0:08:26-0:08:50).

This was no mere slip-up on Bruce Leininger’s part. He said the same thing in a 2002 unaired ABC program on the James Leininger story. He also said it in 2005 news segments. And in an unpublished 2003 chronology of events, Mr. Leininger attributes to his son the claim that his plane was shot down at Iwo Jima. Prior to the Leiningers’ book, the claim they attributed to James was unambiguously a claim about the location of the plane crash. However, beginning with their book, the claim is not an unambiguous claim about location. It’s an unclear claim Mr. Leininger interprets as James saying that his plane was shot down during the battle of Iwo Jima. Nor is this change innocuous. For reasons to be explained below, the change is evidentially significant.

Premise (P3) – The Alleged Matches to James Huston Jr.

As for (P3), we have overwhelming reason to think it’s false. 

Recall that Mr. Leininger makes some very strong claims about the extent to which James’s claims matched Huston.

The evidence presented describes who he was [as Huston], how he was killed, where he was killed, when he was killed and also numerous details of his past life family and intimate details of numerous other events and other people James encountered and knew as Jimmy.

The facts never varied from or differed with anything he said about his past life. The result – the best documented case of reincarnation as claimed by professionals studying reincarnation. (CSD, p. 7).

What are we to make of this?

The Iwo Jima Attribution

Many of the “accurate” claims Mr. Leininger attributes to James in his BICS paper are later redactions of what James allegedly said. These redactions occurred only after the Leiningers had learned facts about Huston and his death.

A stunning example of this is item (8), James’s alleged Iwo Jima claim discussed above. James pointed to an aerial image of the island of Iwo Jima and said his plane crashed there. He gave the location of his plane crash as Iwo Jima. Beginning with Soul Survivor, Mr. Leininger changed the claim he attributed to his son to “That’s when my plane crashed.” This change came after Bruce Leininger learned that Huston’s plane was shot down at Chichi Jima, a different island about 200 miles north of Iwo Jima. So the original claim is false. But Huston’s death did occur while the Natoma Bay – the carrier on which Huston was stationed and flew from the day of his death – was supporting operations at Iwo Jima. On account of its vagueness, the claim later attributed to James has the advantage of not being obviously false. 

Jim Tucker asked Bruce Leininger about this discrepancy. Mr. Leininger allegedly said he later correctly recalled that James had said when not where (Tucker, Return to Life, p. 75). So, this means Mr. Leininger incorrectly remembered this event for nearly a decade. Mr. Leininger acknowledges how important this anecdote is (SS, p. 104; cf. CSD, p. 10). Getting this fact wrong undercuts Mr. Leininger’s reliability as a witness. But also, we have no more reason to suppose that when – if that’s what James actually said – was intended as a temporal reference than a location reference for which James had used the wrong word. This is hardly a surprising error for a two year old to make. Yet, Mr. Leininger would have us believe that his son’s claim is nonetheless veridical.

Mr. Leininger commits a common fallacy. He changes the narrative so that it better aligns with subsequently discovered facts. In Soul Survivor Mr. Leininger says that he initially discounted Huston as the pilot in his son’s narrative because the facts he discovered between September and December 2002 didn’t fit James’s claims. For example, Bruce reasoned, “Huston wasn’t even killed at Iwo Jima. He was killed on a mission a couple of hundred miles away, at a place called Chichi-Jima” (SS, p. 141). Clearly, Mr. Leininger was sure his son had given the location of the plane crash. Since the facts didn’t match, he was reluctant to accept Huston as the previous personality. But change what James said and the discrepancy goes away. Problem is, there’s no independent reason to suppose that James intended to give the time period of his crash. Claiming otherwise looks suspiciously like painting the target around the spot where the dart has landed and shouting bullseye.

The Description of Huston’s Death

Bruce Leininger’s description of the content of James’s nightmares and the related claims he attributes to him are far from being an exact match to the circumstances of Huston’s death. It’s only a logical sleight of hand that generates an impression to the contrary. 

He says the following in CSD:

My son, James Leininger, was born in San Mateo, CA. Shortly after his second birthday 10 April of 2000 he began to have violent nightmares or night terrors 4-5 times per week and this went on for several months.

“Airplane crash, on fire… little man can’t get out” were the first discernible shrieks from my son, as he thrashed about under his covers. It seemed as though he was trapped fighting for his life.  It turns out – HE WAS – reliving his death, 3 March 1945.

A single-engine fighter flown by James went up in flames after being hit in the engine and crashed in Futami Ko (harbor). (CSD, p. 6)

2) Mid-April 2000 – Frequent nightmares began occurring 4-5/week

These occurred until August / September 2000 when his memories became spontaneous while fully awake and not as a nightmarish event. His initial discernible comments Airplane crash in water on fire. Little man can’t get out.” (CSD, p. 9)

13) Date 1 September 2001 – While playing with an airplane in the sunroom, James stood up and saluted saying “I salute you and I’ll never forget. Now here goes my neck.” During the same play period he spontaneously said “Before I was born, I was a pilot and my airplane got shot in the engine and crashed in the water and that’s how I died.” (CSD, p. 12)

So, according to James Leininger, Huston’s plane was shot in the engine, burst into flames, and he was trapped inside the burning plane. The plane then crashed into the water. And that’s how Huston died. This narrative is repeated throughout Soul Survivor.

We’ve already seen how James was incorrect about the location of the crash. But it’s worth noting that Mr. Leininger leaves out a couple of crucial details in CSD. James reportedly said that Huston was still alive before impacting the water and after. Huston was alive and trying to extricate himself from the sinking plane. Andrea Leininger said, “After his plane was hit in the engine, it crashed nose first into the water. From what my little James told me after his nightmares, he was alive in the plane when it went into the water, and was kicking to try and break out the canopy to escape the sinking plane… James Huston drowned in the plane, not as a result of the crash.” (A. Leininger, “Leininger Case on ABC – What Did You Think?” Reincarnation Forum, July 9, 2005). Curiously, Soul Survivor and Mr. Leininger’s CSD paper omit this interesting detail.

But how accurate is little James Leininger’s account of what is supposed to be Huston’s crash on March 3, 1945? Mr. Leininger would have us believe it’s completely accurate. But this is false.

The most detailed description of Huston’s crash in primary source documents is in the Natoma Bay Aircraft Action Report written up proximate to the mission in which Huston was killed. That military document says the following:

All aircraft recovered to the west toward the entrance of the harbor. Heavy anti-aircraft took them under fire from each side of the harbor. It was thought to be 3 inch batteries. Lt (jg) J.M. HUSTON was apparently hit by this fire as he approached the harbor entrance. None of the other pilots saw a hit and his airplane was not on fire, but it suddenly nosed over into a 45 degree glide crashing into the water, exploding and burning. At the time the plane nosed over, it was at about 1500 feet altitude and was estimated to have crashed while making about 175 knots. There was no wreckage left afloat and only a greenish yellow spot on the water marked the crash. There was no evidence of a survivor and it is believed that it would have been impossible to survive the crash and resulting explosion. (Position of crash is indicated on diagram). The position of the crash is in enemy territory but possibilities of compromise of classified material is considered improbable. He may have been hit and killed by light fire as no one reported observing any damage to the plane; most of the bursts in the vicinity where he crashed were from 3 inch (or equivalent) guns. (U.S.S. Natoma Bay Aircraft Action Report, sheet 4, emphasis mine. Full six-page report: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6)

This report is clear about several aspects of Huston’s crash that bear on the narrative Bruce Leininger attributes to his son.

  • It indicates that prior to Huston’s FM-2 Wildcat impacting the harbor at Chichi Jima, his plane was not on fire and eyewitnesses didn’t observe any damage to the plane.
  • The report also indicates that it was believed to have been impossible for Huston to survive the impact and resulting explosion.
  • Moreover, since none of the eyewitnesses observed the plane being hit or damaged, the report conjectures that anti-aircraft fire may’ve penetrated the plane and killed Huston. As a result the plane nosed over and crashed into the harbor.

None of this supports the narrative of Huston being trapped in a burning plane and trying to extricate himself, much less surviving the impact and dying from drowning after a failed attempt to extricate himself from the sinking plane. Quite the contrary; the report refutes this narrative. Although Mr. Leininger references the Aircraft Action Report as supporting documentation in his essay (CSD, p. 23), he doesn’t acknowledge that it disconfirms several of the crucial claims he attributes to James – for example, items (2) and (13), and Mr. Leininger’s preliminary narrative (CSD, p. 6). (For a detailed discussion and analysis of the aircraft action report, see  Section 4 of my JSE paper.)

Corsair Attributions

Mr. Leininger’s CSD paper also relies on later reinterpretations of claims attributed to James. These are post hoc reinterpretations since what the Leiningers later learned about Huston informed the interpretation. For example, James’s early claims about flying a Corsair seemed quite naturally to imply that he flew a Corsair off a boat called Natoma and was shot down while flying the Corsair. And that’s how the Leiningers interpreted him for nearly two years, until they learned that neither was true of Huston, but that he did test fly a Corsair about a year before his death. Item (4) in Mr. Leininger’s CSD chronology is a post-hoc reinterpretation of what James said. He also fails even to acknowledge the ambiguity surrounding the claim in question in its original context. (For a detailed discussion of James’s Corsair claims, see Section 5 of my JSE paper.)

It should be clear that premise (P3) – the alleged similarity between James Leininger’s claims and facts about Huston’s life – is false. Mr. Leininger had said, “All of James Leininger’s (James) words and actions regarding his past life were accurate depictions of his prior incarnation” (CSD, p. 6) and “The facts never varied from or differed with anything he said about his past life” (CSD: 7). These claims are not just false. They are false multiple times over.

The falsehoods are egregious, but what’s arguably more egregious is how Mr. Leininger’s crafting of his story conceals the falsehoods. He’s followed a fairly well-known recipe for creating a deceptive appearance of genuine matches between what a child subject says and facts about a formerly living person. Redact claims attributed to the subject after you learn facts about a deceased person. More specifically, change what you say the subject’s claims originally were or change your interpretation of the claims you attributed to the subject. After all, it’s easier to fit a dart into the bullseye when you paint the target around the spot the dart has landed. Do this especially when you discover that claims you originally attributed to a subject are (probably) false. In other words, create alternative facts. Also, expunge from your narrative other claims you once attributed to a subject that are improbable or which are specific enough to open themselves to disconfirmation. Finally, ignore facts that don’t fit what the subject claims. Leininger has used every ingredient in this recipe to fashion a highly misleading narrative.

Premise (P4) – Ordinary Sources of Information

What about (P4)?

I noted two forms of (P4).

(P4) It is impossible that the matches in (P3) are mere coincidences or that James acquired the information from ordinary sources.

and

(P4*) It is improbable that the matches in (P3) are mere coincidences or that James acquired the information from ordinary sources.

Leininger appears committed to (P4), but (P4) is obviously false. I suggested (P4*) as an alternative since it’s not as obviously false as (P4). But, as I’ll show below, (P4*) is also false. Hopefully it’s clear that if the logically weaker claim (P4*) is false, then the logically stronger claim (P4) is false.

Mr. Leininger nowhere provides evidence for (P4) or (P4*). This alone would make this premise unwarranted. You don’t provide a good argument for reincarnation by relying on a premise that’s at least as equally contentious as the conclusion itself. And even if (P4) or (P4*) were less contentious than the conclusion, it’s the kind of claim that needs support. Why should we think it’s true? Leininger never says. He only offers his impression that it seems to him to be true. That’s obviously no reason to think it’s true.

But the more serious problem is that there’s compelling reason to think the contentious premise is false in both of its forms. Mr. Leininger doesn’t as much as acknowledge the counter-evidence, much less does he critically address it.  It’s not even on his radar. In my JSE paper, I chided Jim Tucker for mishandling this aspect of the case – he apparently wasn’t aware of several ordinary sources of information to which James was exposed. But it’s more egregious in Mr. Leininger’s case. Unlike Tucker, Leininger had first-hand acquaintance with his son’s day-to-day life as this story unfolded. And he was directly responsible for exposing James to several ordinary sources of information.

The Cavanaugh Flight Museum

Bruce Leininger says the following in CSD:

As an infant/toddler James was a fanatic about anything involving aircraft. By age two he had accumulated several toy aircraft and exhibited an exasperating troubling habit of crashing them into a coffee table knocking off the propellers. If we were in a car or the backyard and he saw an aircraft flying he would excitedly point at it. Because of his interest I took him on a visit to the Kavanaugh [sic] Flight Museum in mid-February 2000 just prior to moving from Dallas, TX to Lafayette, LA. Part of the inducement was the promise of ice cream at a McDonald’s nearby. The visit was exasperating. He was uncontrollable with excitement. A visit that could take less than hour took almost three. He vigorously protested every time I tried to take him the hanger housing the WWII aircraft and would run back toward it every time we left. Once there he stood transfixed on several occasions for 10-15 minutes staring and pointing. It was as if James was hypnotized by the WWII aircraft. (CSD, p. 8)

Mr. Leininger doesn’t say much in CSD about the content of the Cavanaugh Flight Museum. In Soul Survivor he provides a bit more detail – for example, that James saw the FM-2 Wildcat and P-51 Mustang planes on display, and that he took James to the museum again for another lengthy visit on Memorial Day weekend that same year (SS: 23-27). Bruce Leininger and his wife Andrea have repeatedly assured the public that James wasn’t exposed to anything that could be the source of the knowledge he exhibited in the early months of the case – for example, his identifying a drop tank on a toy plane, the imagery of his nightmares, his knowing the name of the Corsair fighter plane, and his ability to identify the Japanese by the “big red sun,” the red dot symbol. They’ve been explicit that none of these specific items can be traced to anything James saw or heard at the Cavanaugh Flight Museum. 

Bruce Leininger has said:

He knew the plane [Corsair]. How could James know the name of a World War II fighter aircraft, much less with certainty that it was the aircraft in the dream? And how the hell did James know it launched from aircraft carriers? Nothing that he had ever seen or read or heard could have influenced him to have this memory? (Quoted in Leslie Kean, Surviving Death, p. 21)

In the 2004 ABC Primetime segment, Andrea Leininger said:

I knew what he watched on television. I knew what stories I read to him. I’m a protective, first-time southern mother. There’s no other place he could have been getting this information. (See Video: Unexplained Phenomena, 00:12:17-00:12:27)

She’s also said:

The flight museum has refurbished planes in it from WWI, WWII, plus the Korean War, Vietnam, and then more modern military aircraft. There was no Corsair on exhibit at the time, and there were no videos of burning or crashing planes. Just large hangers with the aircraft from each era sitting out on display. It was about 4 months after the trip to the museum that James had his first nightmare. When the whole night terror thing started, we briefly considered the trip to the museum as a cause, but since he had been just a very young toddler, so much time had passed (four months is a long time in toddler years!) and none of what he was telling us could be traced back to that museum visit, we eliminated it as a possibility. (Andrea Leininger, “Re: Confessions of a Skeptic” in Soul Survivor Blog, Comment 418, September 30, 2009)

The problem with the Leiningers’ testimony at this crucial juncture is that it’s demonstrably false.

With assistance from current and former staff at the Cavanaugh Flight Museum, I was able to reconstruct the content of the Cavanaugh Flight Museum when James visited in 2000. In my JSE paper I document this content in detail. The museum had a variety of Corsair toys and models airplanes in the gift shop where James spent considerable time. It had a large Japanese battle flag featuring the “big red sun” in the hallway of the gift shop. In the gallery connected to the gift shop, there were large images of Corsair planes in combat over islands. There were several drop tanks on display on planes and in an artifacts hangar.  And there was a room with aviation videos on WW2 and Vietnam which the public could view. We have here a lot of information Mr. Leininger attributes to James and treats as inexplicable but for the reincarnation hypothesis – for example, items (1), (2), (4), (5), (6), (7), (8), and (12). See my Cavanaugh Flight Museum page for images of exhibits and the museum gift shop.

Blue Angels and Corsair Videos

Another curious omission. Bruce Leininger says nothing in CSD about the Blue Angels aviation video James watched. Bruce purchased it for James during their February 2000 visit to the museum (SS, p. 24). James watched the video regularly for over a year, so much so that Bruce had replace it at least twice. Regrettably, Mr. Leininger has repeatedly given the incorrect name of the video. Despite the inability of previous researchers to locate the video, we now know its name. It’s Blue Angels Around the World at the Speed of Sound (A&E 1994). Dennis Quaid narrates, and the video features the Queen song ‘It’s a Kind of Magic.’

How is the Blue Angels video relevant?

The Blue Angels video has a combat strike scene with images of a fighter plane being shot and bursting into flames. The video also illustrates many of the behaviors and claims Mr. Leininger attributes to James, especially in Soul Survivor. Item (2) in the CSD chronology states that James had nightmares of being in a plane that bursts into flames after being shot. The video is explanatorily relevant, if not an obvious source influencing the emergence and character of James’s nightmares. The video contains the imagery of the nightmares, as well as an aspect of the nightmare’s narrative. And James started watching the video just before his nightmares began, and he continued watching it while his nightmares were recurring for nearly a year. And it needs to emphasized that he repeatedly watched the video as a ritual of sorts, so much so that the VHS tape had to be replaced at least twice (SS, pp. 21-22, 24, 57 118). The video is also potentially relevant to other items in the CSD chronology – for example, (3), (6), (7), and possibly (14), (16), and (20).

A video clip of the combat strike scene is below. For screen shots of these and other video images, see my page Blue Angels: Around the World at the Speed of Sound

Video: Combat Strike Scene in Blue Angels Video

 

Little James watched the above clip over and over again for more than a year. He starting watching it before his nightmares began. And he continued watching it while his nightmares were ongoing for nearly a year.

Consider also how Mr. Leininger’s writing Carol Bowman out of his chronology impacts crucial item (13) in his list of alleged evidence.

13) Est. Date 1 September 2001 – While playing with an airplane in the sunroom, James stood up and saluted saying “I salute you and I’ll never forget. Now here goes my neck.” During the same play period he spontaneously said “Before I was born, I was a pilot and my airplane got shot in the engine and crashed inthe water and that’s how I died.” (CSD, p. 12)

According to Bowman and the Leininger narrative in Soul Survivor, Bowman got involved in the case in winter 2001. At that time she told the Leiningers that James was recalling a past life in his nightmares. She also advised them to tell James that he was experiencing things that had happened to him before. She told them this in February 2001 and they followed her advice. Given this, it’s unsurprising that James would later embed claims in a first-person reincarnation narrative. Cutting Bowman from the chronology masks this obvious naturalistic inference.

Nor is Mr. Leininger’s failure to detect ordinary sources of information restricted to the first two years of the story. It extends to later claims he attributes to his son.

Some of these are blatant.

30) 7 October 2003 – Out for a walk on my birthday with James I was talking about the tough day I’d had. James said “Dad, every day is like a carrier landing. If you walk away from it you are OK!” Again, this was not a 5-year-old child speaking; it was an older soul. (CSD, p. 16)

James’s philosophical insight here has a fairly obvious ordinary source which apparently didn’t show up on Bruce Leininger’s radar. James’s statement is found in a 2002 A&E documentary on the Corsair plane. In Battle Stations: Corsair Pacific Warrior, WW2 Corsair pilot Colonel Archie Donahue said, “Each day in life is like a carrier landing. If you can walk away from it, you’re in good shape.” The A&E documentary focused on the role of the Corsair in the war in the Pacific. Donahue made his statement while discussing difficulties of carrier landings.

Video: Archie Donahue Statement in Corsair Pacific Warrior

 

We know James saw this documentary. It’s the “History Channel program about Corsairs” the Leiningers admit James watched on a video tape (SS, p. 268). The Leiningers don’t give the title of the video. However, they describe a scene uniquely characteristic of the program. So, there’s no doubt they’re referring to the Battle Stations Corsair film.

Although the Leiningers are not clear about when James watched the tape of the program, we can establish a time frame. The documentary first aired on December 26, 2002 on the History Channel network. James made the statement to his father on October 7, 2003. So, James had nine months to acquire a tape of the program, watch it repeatedly, and absorb its content.

The statement Mr. Leininger invests with great evidential value appears in this program. Yet, he doesn’t as much as acknowledge this fact. He exhibits no awareness of it. He admits the family had a tape of the program. He acknowledges that James watched it. But he’s unaware of the information James mined from the video. What Mr. Leininger regards as evidence for reincarnation is nothing of the sort. It’s evidence for how easy it is for children to pick up information without their parents noticing.

Premise (P4) – Coincidence

Mr. Leininger also dismisses the role of coincidence in the James Leininger story. But he does so in the absence of any kind of argument. He just asserts that the facts go “beyond coincidence.” There’s not even an attempt to show this. It’s just his impression, a description of his psychology.

This is understandable from one angle. It’s fairly well-established that ordinary intuitions concerning probability are frequently incorrect. People are poor judges about how probability governs events in the world. Consequently, they don’t reason well about coincidences. This is especially true when it comes to reasoning about the paranormal. Leininger illustrates many of these wrongheaded intuitions.

Supposedly, the facts in the Leininger case are too improbable for chance to have played a role. But what is this degree of improbability (even approximately)? And how improbable must an event be to plausibly rule out coincidence? In the 1980s Evelyn Marie Adams won the New Jersey lottery twice in four months. The chance of that happening was 1 in 1 trillion. Is the improbability of any fact in the James Leininger story greater or less than that? If greater, Mr. Leininger should show how he determined that probability. If less, then something more improbable than the Leininger story happened by chance. 

But suppose that a hypothesis, like coincidence, confers a low probability on some observation(s). Why should that be a reason to reject the hypothesis? Why should it be evidence against the hypothesis? I draw an Ace of Spades from a deck of cards. If it was a normal deck and a random draw, that outcome has a probability of 1/52. The draw is improbable. Surely my drawing the Ace of Spades is not evidence against the draw being random. Nor is it evidence against the deck being a normal deck. And it’s reasonable to think the New Jersey lottery was fair, despite Adams’ two wins being hugely improbable. The moral of the story: you don’t reject a hypothesis merely because it makes some observation(s) improbable. Of course, perhaps such a hypothesis is false. Then again, maybe something improbable happened.

What is relevant is whether hypothesis H1 makes an observation more or less probable than does hypothesis H2. In that case, we can say the observation is evidence for or against a particular hypothesis. If observation O is more probable if H1 is true than if H2 is true, O favors H1. But this is contrastive. You contrast what each of two hypotheses leads you to expect. From this viewpoint, it doesn’t matter how improbable coincidence makes an observation. What matters is whether the reincarnation hypothesis makes the observation less improbable than does coincidence. Showing that, of course, is considerably more difficult than just saying it’s so.

Of course, there are other probabilistic errors that vitiate Mr. Leininger’s thinking. For example, many of his alleged matches depend on the law of near enough. He regards sufficiently similar events as identical. For example, the content of James’s dreams and the circumstances of Huston’s death. This kind of problem is rampant in pro-reincarnation literature. It’s a glaring weakness, though. Yet, survivalists like Leininger continue to fall into this trap because they ask the wrong kinds of questions. They ask whether a subject’s claims fit a fact. Instead, they should ask what other facts would also fit the subject’s claims. This will tell you how broad or narrow the parameters of a match are. That’s a helpful way of seeing whether you’re relying on the law of near enough to create illusory matches.

See section 7 of my JSE paper for a detailed application of the improbability principle to various aspects of the James Leininger case. For the broader conceptual landscape, see David Hand’s The Improbability Principle and Leonard Mlodinow’s The Drunkard’s Walk.

But there’s a more pedestrian fallacy lurking in Mr. Leininger’s discussion. And it requires no sophisticated grasp of the law-like features of the world. Just because it seems to Mr. Leininger that the presumed facts go “beyond coincidence,” that’s absolutely no reason to think that they do. And just because Mr. Leininger can’t imagine an ordinary source of explanation, that’s no reason to think something extraordinary influenced James’s experience, behavior, or claims. These closely-allied errors in critical thinking – a variant on the appeal to ignorance – vitiate Leininger’s BICS essay, and much of the literature on survival.

(P4) is nothing more than an unsupported assertion. And we know it’s false. That’s not to say it’s not evidence. It is evidence – it’s evidence of the limits of Mr. Leininger’s knowledge. But it’s no evidence for the truth of Mr. Leininger’s reincarnation hypothesis.

What about the Rest of the Evidence?

Mr. Leininger’s CSD “chronological trail” contains a list of 45 items. 34 are items involving attributions of claims and behaviors to James, and 11 are descriptions of confirmatory evidence. Of the 34 James attributions, I have addressed the dubious nature of 14 of them as evidence for reincarnation: (1), (2), (3), (4), (5), (6 – partial), (7 – partial), (8), (12), (13), (14), (16), (20), and (30).  Obviously, I’ve not addressed all of the items in Leininger’s chronology. Thankfully, it’s not necessary for me to do so.

First, I’ve tried to show several ways in which Mr. Leininger’s argument is defective. None of my counter-arguments requires addressing every item in his list of purported evidence, nor even most of them. Mr. Leininger nowhere shows that his conclusion – James Leininger is the reincarnation of James Huston, Jr. – is a necessary inference from the presumed facts he catalogues. Much less does he show that his reasoning carries the force of a geometric demonstration. He fails to do this because he fails to present any argument at all. The rest of the alleged evidence is irrelevant to this. His reasoning also relies on unwarranted claims – they’re either false or we have good reason to doubt that they’re true. Showing this doesn’t require that I address every item in his list.

To make this clear, let’s consider the more plausible version of Leininger’s suggested argument.

(P1) James made the claims attributed to him in the chronology and made them at the times specified in the chronology.

(P2) James exhibited the behaviors attributed to him in the chronology and exhibited them at the times specified in the chronology.

(P3) All the claims and behaviors attributed to James in (P1) and (P2) exactly match James Huston, Jr.

(P4*) It is improbable that the matches in (P3) are mere coincidences or that James acquired the information from ordinary sources.

Therefore, probably:

(C) James Leininger is the reincarnation of James Huston, Jr.

I’ve shown that (P3) is false. It’s easily refutable by a single counter-example, but I’ve provided several. I’ve also shown that the no-ordinary-source-of-information component of (P4) is false. And Leininger provides no evidence that would rule out (as improbable) the mere coincidence component of (P4). So we’re not warranted in accepting (P4) either. I’ve also shown that Mr. Leininger has a credibility problem. This prevents us from rationally accepting premises (P1) and (P2).  Inconsistencies within and between the various chronologies and suspicious narrative redactions are a serious problem in this case. Mr. Leininger can’t be trusted to accurately convey what James said/did and when he said/did it. If even one premise in the above argument is unwarranted, the argument is defeated. I’ve shown that each of the four premises is unwarranted. This is not simply a weak argument. It’s textbook terrible. 

Second, I’ve intended this discussion to be a supplement to my lengthy JSE paper. For that purpose, it’s not necessary to address other items in the CSD chronology. Of course, in my JSE paper I address some of the more interesting items not discussed here. These include the Natoma and Jack Larsen claims attributed to James Leininger in late summer/early fall 2000. What I have to say about these items is important. Among other things, I address widespread confusions about how coincidence and improbability work in the world. I’d encourage people to read my detailed JSE report to see what I have to say about these other aspects of this case.

How Unreliability Infects Other Alleged Evidence

Some survivalists are likely to respond that, in the absence of addressing the other items in Leininger’s chronology, skepticism about the case as a whole is not warranted. I’m afraid this isn’t plausible. Some of the items discussed here and in my JSE paper are essential features of the case as a whole. So, it’s not as if the dubious nature of these items has no relevance to what we think of the case as a whole. Quite the contrary. But more importantly, the rest of the evidence is only as credible as Mr. Leininger is reliable. And that’s a serious problem for this case.

Suppose we acquire good reasons to doubt the reliability of a source. All other things been equal, we have acquired good reasons to doubt whatever they say. Showing that some of a person’s testimonial claims are false may be necessary to establish their lack of reliability, but skepticism concerning the rest of their claims doesn’t require showing that their other claims are false.

Neither Bruce nor Andrea Leininger is reliable when it comes to what James said/did or when he said/did it. And they’re even less reliable when it comes to ruling out the plausibility of ordinary sources of information. Appealing to the rest of the evidence requires trusting testimony that should not be trusted, especially when it comes to judgments about James’s exposure to ordinary sources of information. Even if we could trust Mr. Leininger’s chronology of facts, we simply cannot trust him in ruling out ordinary sources of information. 

Bob Greenwalt and the Three G.I. Joes

Let me illustrate why the latter point is significant to the evidential force of other alleged facts in the case. I’ll use two items from Leininger’s list which some people seem to find particularly impressive.

I. Item (36) (CSD, p. 17) describes an incident on September 11, 2004 at the Natoma Bay reunion in San Antonio Texas which James Leininger (then age six) attended. It concerns a meeting between James Leininger and WW2 veteran Bob Greenwalt. Greenwalt was a pilot in Huston’s VC-81 squadron and who flew with Huston on the mission in which Huston was killed. Greenwalt reportedly stepped out of the elevator, saw little James, and said to him, “Bet you don’t know who I am.” James reportedly responded, “You’re Bob Greenwalt.” Later the Leiningers asked James how he knew the man was Greenwalt and he said, “I remembered his voice.” 

II. Items (11), (15), and (33) concern James’s allegedly giving his G.I. Joes names that matched the names of friends of James Huston and who served with him on the Natoma Bay as members of the VC-81 flight squadron but who died in WW2 before Huston was killed. We’re told that on April 10, 2001 James received a G.I. Joe with brown hair for his birthday and named it Billy – item (11). Then on December 25, 2001 James received a G.I. Joe with blond hair for Christmas and named it Leon – item (15). Finally, on December 25, 2003, James received a red-haired G.I. Joe for Christmas and named it Walter – item (33). As Mr. Leininger explains, Billy Peeler, Leon Conner, and Walter Devlin served with Huston in his flight squadron on the Natoma Bay, and James Leininger allegedly told his parents these men met him (as Huston) when he got to heaven (CSD, pp. 11-12, 16).

The Consequences of Unreliable Testimony

Like so many of the other items in Leininger’s chronology, (I) and (II) will provide evidential support for the reincarnation hypothesis only if: 

(*) Bruce Leininger can provide a reasonable assurance that James was not exposed to anything that could be a salient information source.

More specifically, the evidential force of (I) and (II) depends on our being warranted in accepting (*). But we’re not.

Now consider the implications of this for the assessment of (I) and (II). Consider just how problematic it is that we can’t rationally accept (*).

According to Soul Survivor (SS, pp. 269-270), though not included in CSD, Bob Greenwalt called the Leininger residence shortly after the airing of the April 2004 ABC Primetime episode. This would’ve been a few months before the Natoma Bay reunion James attended. Andrea Leininger picked up the phone and said out loud “Bob Greenwalt is on the line – he knew James Huston” (SS, p. 269). Bruce Leininger then got on the phone and the two talked like old war buddies.

If James was present, he would’ve heard Bob Greenwalt’s name mentioned. If he was near the phone, he could’ve easily heard Bob Greenwalt’s voice coming through the phone. For all we know, the Leiningers had two lines. In which case, James could’ve easily heard Greenwalt’s voice by picking up the other line. For all we know, this wasn’t the only time Greenwalt called the Leininger residence. And for all we know, James heard Greenwalt’s name and voice at the Natoma Bay reunion before the elevator encounter. None of these scenarios is antecedently improbable. The only people who can give us a reasonable assurance that these scenarios were unlikely are the Leiningers. But these are the same people who couldn’t detect James’s exposure to images and information on videos he regularly watched. They are the same people who, despite their best efforts, couldn’t trace anything James said to the Cavanaugh Flight Museum.

As for the G.I. story, James named the G.I. Joes on April 10, 2001 (Billy), December 25, 2001 (Leon), and December 25, 2003 (Walter). The three events are spread out over 20 months. Can we be reasonably sure that nothing James learned influenced the naming of the G.I. Joes? What could possibly have so influenced him? On January 6, 2001 (CSD, p. 11), Bruce Leininger acquired a list of 18 Natoma Bay men killed in action during in WW2. The list included James Huston, Walter Devlin, and Leon Conner. Three other Natoma Bay veterans, including Billie Peeler, were not on the list Bruce Leininger acquired in January 2001, but he subsequently added them based on information he acquired at the Natoma Bay reunion in fall 2002.

As in the case of the Bob Greenwalt story, it’s what we don’t know that matters. Mr. Leininger was deeply involved in doing historical research to validate his son’s claims. Did Mr. Leininger never mention any of the names of these names out loud over 20 months? Could James have heard any of these names in that way? At some point during the 20 months, James began to read. Did James have access to the KIA list, including the names of Leon and Walter, at any point prior to Christmas 2001 or Christmas 2003? There are many conceivable causal pathways, and many more that wouldn’t immediately come to mind. Only the Leiningers can give us reasonable assurance that James didn’t pick up on these names by hearing or reading them. But this they cannot do since they’ve demonstrated themselves to be unreliable in detecting fairly obvious sources of information that influenced James.

The problem should be apparent. What James said/did and when he said/did it is only one area where the reliability of Mr. Leininger is important. It also matters whether we can trust his judgment (and Andrea Leininger’s judgment) concerning ordinary sources of information. Skepticism about (I) and (II) doesn’t require proving that James acquired the salient information in any of the above scenarios. It’s sufficient to have good reason not to trust that Mr. Leininger can plausibly rule out such scenarios. 

Some advocates of reincarnation may double down on Mr. Leininger’s credibility. However, they should be prepared to state just how much outright falsehood, factual gerrymandering, and narrative shenanigans are acceptable or tolerable in the interest of defending the evidential value of this case.

Conclusion: Masking the Fundamental Question

Does Bruce Leininger’s CSD essay provide the “best evidence” for survival? Nothing I’ve said here implies that it doesn’t. Perhaps the judges in the Bigelow competition were right and this paper is an example of the best survivalists have to offer in the way of evidence for their assertions. But if that’s the case, the judges have provided a stunning validation of just how impoverished the field of survival research is. If Mr. Leininger’s essay is among the best survivalists have to offer, they’ll need to considerably up their game. And seeing as several other prize-winning essays in the competition favorably refer to this case, I’d say the wider pool of winners reinforce rather than obviate this worry.

Then again, the central question to which essayists responded in the BICS competition already betrays confusion. The “best evidence” can be and often is bad evidence. Sometimes it’s downright shitty evidence. The better question is, what is good evidence? And to answer this, we should probably first get clear about what isn’t good evidence. Weak inferences from unwarranted premises is certainly one example of really bad evidence.

But the question of evidence – good or bad – is perhaps premature. As H.H. Price pointed out over half a century ago, before we ask about the evidence for survival, we should first be clear about the meaning of survival itself.

I would suggest that those who incline to the Survival hypothesis should spend less of their time collecting evidence for it, and should rather turn their attention for the present to the clarification of the hypothesis itself. (H.H. Price, Philosophical Interactions with Parapsychology, p. 25).

Price was well-versed in the alleged empirical evidence for survival in his day, but he was also a philosopher and so understood the conceptual dimensions to the survival debate. And he was right about the misguided and premature emphasis on getting evidence for an ill-defined hypothesis, especially one that comes married to a variety of unspoken assumptions. C.D. Broad also emphasized this point. In more recent years, Stephen Braude has emphasized the importance of the conceptual scaffolding of the survival debate. It was an important theme in his book Immortal Remains, and he also discussed it in his prize-winning essay for the BICS competition (quoted above). It was also a crucial part of the argument I presented in my 2016 book on empirical arguments for survival.

The reason why the conceptual questions are important is that how we answer questions of evidence depends on them. These questions include epistemological questions about the nature of evidence, probability, and explanation. But the content of the survival hypothesis is central. Until we get clear about that, we won’t know how the world should look if our hypothesis is true or how it should look if our hypothesis is false. We won’t know whether life after death has any empirical consequences at all. So, unless we get clear about the concept of life after death, we won’t be clear about what favorable evidence for it should even look like it. And we won’t be clear about the kinds of assumptions such favorable evidence requires.

If we wish to have an empirically meaningful hypothesis, we can neither dispense with nor retard inquiry into the concept of life after death itself. If we fail here, we’re likely to be confident that the best evidence is good evidence, when in fact it may be shitty evidence or no evidence at all. 

Dr. Michael Sudduth

Revised: 1/18/2022

The James Leininger Case Re-examined (JSE Paper)

James Leininger JSE Paper

The James Leininger Case Re-examined [PDF]

Article Abstract

In “The James Leininger Case Re-examined” (Journal of Scientific Exploration, Vol. 35, No. 4, 2021), I examine an alleged case of reincarnation previously investigated and analyzed by Jim Tucker, M.D. The case concerns Louisiana boy James Leininger, originally presented in Bruce and Andrea Leininger’s book Soul Survivor (2009). 

The James Leininger Story

Around the time of his second birthday, James Leininger began having nightmares of being trapped in a burning plane. He subsequently provided further details about the ongoing nightmares. He said he was a pilot who flew off a boat. The Japanese shot his plane down, it crashed in the water, and that’s how he died. As his nightmares persisted, James continued to make further claims about WW2, especially details about fighter planes.

James’s parents attempted to verify his claims. Eventually, they determined that his behaviors and claims matched the life of James M. Huston, Jr. Huston was a WW2 fighter pilot killed in action on March 3, 1945. The resemblances to Huston’s life eventually convinced the Leiningers that their son was the reincarnation of Huston.

Jim Tucker investigated the case in 2010, and in subsequent publications he provided a favorable analysis of the case. Other reincarnation researchers have agreed and regard the James Leininger story as a superior American case of the reincarnation type.

My Evaluation

Between 2019 and 2021, I investigated the James Leininger story. My investigation included extensive fact-checking and discussions with over a dozen people familiar with different aspects of the case. In this paper, I present my findings and their implications for the evaluation of the case as evidence for reincarnation. I conclude that the James Leininger story does not provide evidence for reincarnation.

The favorable assessment of the case depends on the assumption that the official narrative is robust and credible. I argue that the chronology of events that provides the factual scaffolding of this case is neither robust nor credible. This is especially true with respect to what are allegedly the case’s strongest features.

  • The narrative is not robust. It excludes salient contextual details about James’s exposure to ordinary sources of information. These sources, including videos and museum visits, plausibly shaped James’s experiences and informed his claims and behaviors. And the official chronology of events doesn’t clearly track how the Leiningers inadvertently introduced sources of information as part of the process of verifying James’s claims.
  • The narrative is also not credible. The presumed facts of the case depend on the testimony of Bruce and Andrea Leininger, but their testimony is unreliable. They’ve presented multiple iterations of their story with incompatible accounts of what James said and when he said it. Their story involves suspicious narrative redactions, fact fudging, and a suppression of facts that disconfirm crucial aspects of their story. They’ve also failed to detect James’s exposure to many important ordinary sources of information which plausibly influenced him.

These two defects – lack of narrative robustness and credibility – also vitiate Jim Tucker’s investigation and presentation of the case. Consequently, his favorable assessment of the case as evidence for reincarnation is unwarranted.

Conversation with Steinhart on Life after Death

ydacoverPhilosopher Eric Steinhart at William Paterson University has published widely in the areas of metaphysics and philosophy of religion. Among his fascinating contributions is the attention he’s paid to how our digital technologies have provided new and more naturalistic ways of exploring religious topics. “Digitalism,” as Steinhart explains, “is a philosophical strategy that uses these new computational ways of thinking to develop naturalistic but meaningful approaches to religious problems involving minds, souls, life after death, and the divine.”[*] He’s examined the implications of digitalism for life after death in a variety of papers over the past several years, but his most systematic exploration is found in is book Your Digital Afterlives: Computational Theories of Life after Death (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

Traditional philosophical and empirical approaches to life after death are subject to a variety of objections. I’ve discussed some of the more refractory conceptual problems in my own book on life after death. Other problems include substantialist views of the self, mind-body dualism, and immaterialist conceptions of the self. These assumptions have unfortunately constrained discourse on life after death and stalemated dialogue. Steinhart provides an alternative afterlife model which is both physicalist in nature and compatible with visions of the afterlife preserved in the rich heritage of the spiritual traditions of the world – for example, rebirth in Buddhism and bodily resurrection in the western Abrahamic traditions.

In my conversation with Professor Steinhart below, he discusses the limits and defects of traditional approaches to life after death, including the flawed paranormal scaffolding of many empirical approaches to life after death. He outlines the contrasting digitalist view of life after death and how it can make sense of traditional religious ideas like reincarnation and resurrection. 

Conversation with Eric Steinhart on Life after Death

Sudduth: Eric, I was hoping we could begin with you sharing a bit about your academic background and the genesis and evolution of your interest in the topic of life after death.

Steinhart: I grew up in a hard-core evangelical Christian household.  I was very religious, very devout.  And many of my male relatives were ministers.  So I read the Bible very carefully.  I had trouble with the soul – what was it?  Why wasn’t it discussed in the Bible?  I was fascinated with the resurrection of the body.  Eventually, of course, I learned that mind-body dualism is mainly a Greek idea, imposed on a much more materialistic Biblical conception of resurrection.  My fascination with resurrection really drove me to think of human persons as entirely physical human animals.  I rejected mind-body dualism when I was a teenager.  After college, and after I left Christianity, I was a computer scientist for nearly a decade.  One day I picked up Hans Moravec’s book “Mind Children”, and I was struck by the similarities of his ideas to my earlier Biblical ideas about resurrection.  He introduced me to many of the more religious aspects of computer science.

Digital Afterlives

Sudduth: Lots of people tend to presume that if they’re going to survive death or have some kind of life after death, they must be an immaterial being or at least a being whose consciousness has the capacity to continue without any material substrate. In other words, people think that given materialist assumptions, if the brain dies, then it’s unlikely that the mind will survive. How does this view overlook other possibilities?

ecs-nycSteinhart: When it comes to life after death, so many people are caught up in Cartesian mind-body dualism.  So they overlook other options. They forget that material things like brains and bodies have forms.  Material particles are arranged in certain ways to make brains and bodies, and the arrangement carries information.  The form or structure of the body encodes information.  So the main alternative to mind-body dualism is based on information.  Since it’s based on information, it’s a computational view of human animals.  We’re purely material things, but our materiality encodes a form.  This form is analogous to a computer program.  Our bodies are therefore like biological computing machines which run person-programs.  Our programs are abstract objects.  They are like mathematical objects, such as numbers, or functions from numbers to numbers.  Since this view is inspired by digital computing, it can be referred to as digitalism.

Following Plato, our person-programs exist eternally.  When you are alive, your person-program is instantiated by your body, which runs that program.  When you die, your person-program ceases to be run.  But your person-program can be run again, later, by some new body.  On this view, you don’t survive death; nobody survives death.  You can’t live through death.  But you can live again after you die.  This sort of view is found in the old Stoic doctrine of the eternal return of the same: on the next cosmic cycle, your person-program will be run again.  The Stoics thought your old person-program would run again in exactly the same way, thus exactly reproducing your life.  But that’s not necessary: on the next cosmic cycle, your circumstances can vary, so that your person-program runs differently, and your next life differs from your previous life.  This idea about person-programs running again after death seems to be a good interpretation of early Christian ideas about the resurrection of the body.  The early Christian doctrines about resurrection were materialistic. Nobody survives death.  But God knows the form of your body – God knows your person-program.  So, when you are resurrected, God just makes a new biocomputer that runs your person-program again.  Resurrection is recreation.  This also seems to be a good way to understand early Theravadic Buddhist ideas about rebirth.

Sudduth: Somewhat related to the prior question, it’s fairly common for people who are contemplating a life after death to conceptualize life after death as the persistence or continuation of an individual self, some notion of personal survival.  Some earlier philosophers, C.D. Broad and H.H. Price for example, argued that we might also suppose that it’s only some aspect of our psychological profile that will continue after death, even if it falls short of being a self or at least the same self that ceased to exist at death. Could you say a bit more about this latter possibility?

Steinhart: Digitalism says that you won’t survive death.  Of course, some parts of you can survive death.  You might be preserved as a mummy.  Or parts of your body might be preserved like the relics of the saints.  Your bones and skull could persist in a crypt.  Or your DNA might be taken from your corpse and used to make a clone.  That clone would carry lots of information about you.  But it wouldn’t carry your epigenetic information or the information encoded in the interconnections between your nerve cells.  It would be a partial version of you. But now we leave lots of data about ourselves behind on our personal computers, on social media websites.  So an artificially intelligent deep learning algorithm could read your Facebook page, all your emails, your cell phone text messages, and all the data on your personal computer, and it could use all that data to build an approximation to your mind.  It would be a partial version of you.  This would be a crude replica.  But these replicas can be made more accurate. 

The limit of the series of ever better approximations is a replica that exactly duplicates all your information.  It’s far more than mere psychology. Human animals are far more than minds.  The mind is just the part of the body that computes; not all of the body computes.  (Of course, parts of the body that don’t compute can be simulated by computers.)  So to be human is to be more than merely psychological.  If there were purely psychological entities, they wouldn’t be human.  An exact replica of you is functionally equivalent to your whole body.  It is functionally indiscernible from your body.  Of course, it’s a just a copy.  A copy is never identical with its original.  Early theories of the resurrection of the body in Judaism and Christianity were replica theories.  They involved the reassembly of the atoms in your body to make a replica of your body.

Digitalism implies that, after you die, something will exist which is functionally equivalent to your body.  Your person-program will run again on some new machine.  It will be a new human animal, realized, perhaps, in very new physics.  But it will be realized in an environment which is functionally very similar to your present environment.  This is just a consequence of the evolution of complexity: evolution produces sequences of patterns.  Old patterns get recycled into new patterns.  Simpler patterns evolve into more complex versions of themselves.  And this happens at every scale, from quarks to universes.  Your person-program, which is just the abstract functionality of your body, is just another pattern.  It is caught up in the evolutionary logic of pattern production.

Mind-Body Dualism and Parapsychology

Sudduth: Lots of parapsychologists oppose or are at least highly critical of materialist philosophies of mind, or even the idea that consciousness depends on a functioning brain (or some sort of material substrate).  One of the motivations here is the very deeply entrenched belief that materialism or mind-brain dependency can’t account for evidence allegedly suggestive of psychic functioning, be it extra-sensory perception or psychokinesis.  In fact, some parapsychologists think the evidence for psychic functioning is evidence against materialism or mind-brain dependency. You have any thoughts on this?

Steinhart: I think the motivation behind parapsychology is terror management (in the sense of terror management theory).  Death evokes terror; to reduce that terror, some people turn to occult theories of persons.  Mind-body dualism is an occult theory of persons.  Parapsychology is part of the occult theory of persons.  I regard parapsychology as a pseudo-science.  Like other pseudo-sciences, it doesn’t have any theory of its own assertions.  Its claims about mind aren’t even false – they’re meaningless.   For instance, how does extra-sensory perception (ESP) work?  Since it has to involve a flow of information, it falls under information theory.  Some channel exists through which information flows at some rate.  Some number of bits are transmitted and received.  So a theory of how ESP works will involve channels and bits.  It will also involve concepts like entropy and mutual entropy.  Sometimes you find parapsychologists using terms from information theory.  But it’s always vague.  Here’s what you never find: a system of equations.  Dualists, and parapsychologists, never formulate mathematically precise theories of immaterial minds or of psychic functioning.

For well over two thousand years, dualists have been offering their occult theories of persons.  And what do they have to show for it?  Nothing.  Dualists have produced no useful results at all about immaterial minds.  At most they can do some very restricted kinds of introspective psychology.  But introspective psychology is almost entirely worthless.  There are no technologies based on psychic functioning.  Dualism hasn’t led to treatments for mental illnesses.  Dualism is a purely negative theory of what it means to be human.  It is a way of perverting the meaning of human being.  Frightened by death, dualists turn away from the body.  They posit a negative image of the body, that is, an immaterial mind.  This mind is precious to them. The concept of the immaterial mind is a fetish.  By means of ritual inscriptions, the immaterial mind is given an aura and saturated with mana. It has to be shrouded in mystery.  You can’t look at it or touch it.  It is sacred, and its sacredness needs to be protected from scientific examination, which would make it profane.

The immaterial mind is a shadow-person.  It really is a ghost, meaning that it is a purely social construct produced and sustained by fear.  If you start to challenge dualists, or those who believe in parapsychology, what you’ll quickly discover is that they panic.  They become highly aroused and extremely defensive.  They start to repeat the same statements over and over again.  They talk about quantum mechanics, or the hard problem of consciousness, or qualia, and so on.  But they don’t understand quantum mechanics.  Or they don’t understand the philosophy.  They repeat themselves without explaining anything.  They are not actually engaging in the rational defense of their ideas: they’re chanting.  They’re repeating protective spells.  They use concepts from the sciences and philosophy like magic words. The words have no meanings; they cannot be logically analyzed; rather, the words are sounds used in incantations. Dualism really does belong with the occult, in the sense of magic.  Anthropologists have studied magic.  And that anthropological study applies to dualism.

Still, it’s hard for me to understand the hostility to materialist theories of mind.  Materialism has produced detailed and comprehensive descriptions of our minds; it has helped us heal mental illnesses.  But even more: materialism is beautiful.  Just take a look at molecular psychology.  Look at molecules like mirtazapine or psilocybin.  Look at how they bind to receptors.  It’s gorgeous!  All that detail, all that complexity, all that computation!  To turn away from materialism is to turn away from mentality.  Dualists hate the mind.  They hate its reality and want to replace that reality with an empty fiction.  The really shocking thing is just how empty that fiction really is.  Dualists have nothing to say about minds.  I think dualists actually hate mentality.  They despise the mind. 

On Paranormal Phenomena

Sudduth: As you know, in my 2016 book on survival I offered a critique of a particular empirical approach to survival, the attempt to argue in favor of survival on the basis of certain ostensibly paranormal phenomena. For example, I discuss verifiable claims to past-life memories and closely-related phenomena seemingly suggestive of reincarnation.  I also examine mental and trance mediumship, where mediums – who profess to communicate with the dead – have detailed information about the deceased and are sometimes able to convey this information through convincing life-like personations of the deceased.

Traditionally, the arguments for survival based on the data collected from these phenomena tend to rest on substance dualist commitments. At any rate, it’s widely assumed that if these data are evidence for survival or life after death, then physicalism must be false.

Now, to the extent that the data concern the persistence of the psychological profile of some formerly living person, or some significant aspect of their psychology, it’s not obvious to me that a physicalist model such as digitalism can’t accommodate these data in principle.  Your thoughts on this?

Steinhart: Digitalism doesn’t require computers to be material.  The definition of a Turing machine, for example, doesn’t involve any matter.  Logic gates, and networks of logic gates, can be as immaterial as you please.  Likewise connectionist models of massively parallel distributed processing systems can be immaterial.  You can develop precise mathematical theories of immaterial information processing machines of any degree of complexity you like.   And you could go on to define ways those machines would interact with materially realized computers.  Of course, this would involve writing out systems of equations.  It would involve describing lawful interactions among different kinds of systems.  Digitalism does not rule out immaterial minds.  But it requires that those minds be described in precise mathematical terms.  It requires lawful regularities.  On the basis of those lawful regularities, you can do science and build technologies. 

But this is where the conflict with the paranormal starts.  Paranormal phenomena never fall into lawful patterns.  They never exhibit lawlike regularities.  They never appear in patterns which are reliably reproducible.  But that’s what data is.  Data is information that you can reliably gather, in reproducible experiments.   So there really isn’t any such thing as data in parapsychology or the study of the paranormal.  Paranormal phenomena are always noise, never signal.  They can’t be reliably reproduced.  They can’t be used to make any technologies.  There are no laws which describe those phenomena or how they occur.

For a digitalist, sure, there could be mediums.  When you die, your person-program could be run by an immaterial computing machine.  It would be functionally isomorphic to your body.  It would be a kind of immaterial animal.  And there could be information channels linking these immaterial animals to material humans.  But all of that would be lawlike.  There would be equations which describe the channels.  There would be scientifically describable structures in the brains of mediums, structures tuned to receive information from immaterial computers.  There would be textbooks filled with equations.  You could train to be a medium.  Mediums would be able to communicate with the dead reliably, on command, in precisely defined ways.  None of this would be mysterious or controversial.  It would be as reliable as cell phones

So why does the so-called data about the paranormal fail to fall into lawful patterns?  Why is it always noise and never signal?  The answer comes, again, from terror management theory.  They body falls under lawful regularities; it is a structure which exhibits mathematical patterning.  But the immaterial minds of the dualists, the occultists, and the parapsychologists are fetish objects created as magical protections against the fear of death.  They are purely imaginary objects which cannot exist within any lawful structures at all.  They cannot exist within any patterns, because the patterns would subject them to real constraints.  They would stop being sacred, and would become profane.  Microsoft would start to produce software that would let your computer talk to the dead.  There would be industries devoted to it.  Money would change hands.  Death would cease to be shrouded in its mysterious aura; its mana would be gone.  So all paranormal phenomena have to be relegated to the noise.  They have to inhabit the shadow-land of uncertainty.  They have to be irregularities.  Magic requires fear; fear requires uncertainty; and uncertainty is noise.

Digitalism and Testability

Sudduth: Beyond their traditional entanglement in the rejection of physicalism, a more serious problem – indeed a core problem – I find with the empirical arguments for survival from psychical research is that a simple supposition of souls or consciousness surviving death wouldn’t lead us to expect the relevant data, even most generally described.  So, to accommodate the data, we must bulk up the idea of survival with various auxiliary assumptions – for example, the assumption that at least some survivors would retain a significant amount of their memories, interests, desires, and other personality traits characteristic of their antemortem existence, as well as possess the capacity to interact with the physical world.  The problem is that there are many ways the life after death narrative could go.  While some of these narratives would accommodate the data, most of them would not. There seems to be no (non-circular) justification for favoring the narrow band of requisite auxiliaries over the many alternatives.

Now I have to wonder whether this problem of auxiliary assumption selection isn’t less of a problem given digitalism.  And here it seems like there are two salient points.

First, generally it seems that it’s going to rest on assumptions that are in principle testable, for the production of mental states by brain processes (or some similar physical process) seems testable in ways that the purported relationship between mental states and an immaterial soul isn’t.  

Second, if we are material machines running abstract person programs, and psychological continuity is fundamentally informational continuity, it would seem that we could (at least some point) say what kind of patterns produce and sustain particular aspects of our psychology. This would lead us to expect certain continuities in psychological profile given the replication of the organizational material structures.

Steinhart: Digitalism aims to be precise, and to be precise in scientific ways.  It is developed out of the sciences of information, computation, and complexity.  So of course digitalists are at least functionalists about minds: if you make an artificial machine that is functionally equivalent to a brain, it will do what the brain does.  Of course, you’ve got to embed that system in something that is functionally equivalent to a body, such as an artificial robot, or a virtual reality world.  You’ve got to replicate the physicality of the flesh, and the physicality of its environment.  But the claims of digitalism are, as you say, empirically testable.  We’re testing them all the time as we build digital technologies, and as we study the brain.  And so far, all the tests are being passed, every day.  We can and do make artificial replicas of neural networks.  And those replicas perform the predicted functions.  We build artificial vision systems, artificial pattern recognition systems, all based on the study of the brain.  Unlike dualism, digitalism produces useful results.

Digitalism and Reincarnation

Sudduth: In your paper “Digital Afterlives,” you discuss “digital reincarnation.” Can you explain the basic features of this alternative model of reincarnation and how it differs from traditional reincarnation views?

Steinhart: Reincarnation theories usually say the same soul gets repeatedly embodied in different bodies.  It seems to require a soul-body or mind-body dualism.  Often these dualisms are substance dualisms, so that the soul is made of some kind of immaterial stuff.  There’s no need to be a substance dualist in order to talk about reincarnation.  If you copy data from one computer to another, that data gets reincarnated on the new computer.  So if you copy the structure of your brain or body into some software body in some virtual reality like a video game, or into software running on some robot, that’s digital reincarnation.  There’s no evidence that people get reincarnated on this earth, and it doesn’t even make much sense to talk about a human being reincarnated as an non-human animal or vice versa.  But some traditional Eastern theories of reincarnation talk about reincarnation across universes.  If you’ve got a multiverse, this becomes possible.  So the soul is the form of the body, and reincarnation is just reinstantiation.

It’s interesting to think of ways karma might be involved in digital reincarnation.  It might work in cases of multiverse reincarnation, where your body-pattern (that is, your soul) gets reinstantiated in some other body.  Karma is often thought of as punitive or retributive: an eye for an eye.  But it doesn’t have to be that way.  The spiritist followers of Kardec, for instance, advocated a progressive sort of karma, in which you are progressively learning moral lessons.  This isn’t retributive punishment, rather, it’s reformation or rehabilitation.  Karma is corrective rather than punitive.  There are lots of interesting ethical ideas here.

Recommendations for Further Reading

Sudduth: What three papers or books – your own or others – would you recommend to people who want to explore digitalism and life after death but who don’t have a very deep background in philosophy or science?

Steinhart: Hans Moravec, Mind Children; Eric Steinhart, Your Digital Afterlives; John Hick, Death and Eternal Life

Sudduth: Thanks for the conversation, Eric. As Jimi Hendrix once said, “If I don’t meet you no more in this world, then I’ll meet you in the next one. Don’t be late.”

[*] Steinhart, Your Digital Afterlives (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), xii.

Correspondence with Bruce Leininger

Leininger Soul SurvivorIn my article on the James Leininger case (forthcoming, the Journal of Scientific Exploration), I refer to correspondence I had with Bruce Leininger as part of my investigation into the case. Due to the length of my JSE paper, I was not able to include my emails to Bruce as appendices to the article. However, I believe the content of these emails is important, though this is likely to be more apparent after readers have my JSE article in hand.

Below I reproduce my last email to Bruce. The email is dated 9/27/21. It was a resend, with attached note, of my previous email to Bruce dated 8/28/21. The email involves a series of questions and follow-up queries related to materials Bruce had said he would look for. Bruce had responded to an earlier email, then without explanation ceased communicating with me.

Brief background. Prior to the 2020 pandemic, Bruce extended an informal invitation to me through a third party to come to Lafayette, Louisiana to view documents and discuss the case with him. The pandemic put this on hold. I also temporarily suspended my research on the case due to personal circumstances and new teaching assignments related to the pandemic.

In late 2020, I resumed my investigation of the case. I postponed connecting with Bruce until I had conducted interviews with several other individuals and completed reviewing interviews others had with the Leiningers. I wanted a good handle on the case before speaking with Bruce.

I wrote Bruce an introductory email on June 5, 2021. I explained that I was working on a chronology of events and had questions Jim Tucker couldn’t answer but which he (Bruce) was best situated to answer for me. Bruce didn’t answer my June 5 email, so I wrote him a follow-up on July 9, 2021. He responded to my email the same day. He answered several questions and said he would get back to me with answers to others, as well as look for specific documents I had requested. Alas, Bruce would never get back to me.

I replied to Bruce on July 10, thanking him for his response and giving him a brief background on my interest in questions concerning postmortem survival. After not receiving a reply to my July 10 email, I wrote Bruce again on August 28, 2021. Again, I received no response. I wrote a follow-up on September 27, 2021. As of today (12/4/21), he has not responded. And, at this point, I’m not expecting to hear from him anytime soon.

The correspondence I reproduce below is my email to Bruce Leininger dated September 27, 2021, which also includes my previous 8/28/21 email. The only redactions are the omission of our email addresses and the name of a former ABC producer with whom I spoke. Naturally, my questions suggest a few things about the content of my forthcoming JSE paper. However, my intention here is simply to document supporting material I reference in the JSE paper.

M.S.

Explanatory notes:

In my email to Bruce Leininger, I make reference to Jim Tucker. I have discussed the James Leininger case with Jim Tucker since 2019. My interest in developing a robust chronology of events was partly the consequence of Tucker declining the request I made to him in December 2019 to send me a detailed chronology. His work responsibilities at the time prevented this, though he was willing to review any chronology I put together. We had many subsequent email exchanges about the case, mostly in 2021. And Tucker and I met for a two-hour zoom session in September 2021. At that time I disclosed to him some of my findings and concerns about the case. I invited him to write a response to my JSE paper.

Question (1) in the email below concerns Andrea Leininger’s correspondence with past-life researcher and therapist Carol Bowman. My question makes reference to “summer of 2000.” The timeframe here was prompted by what Bruce had said in his earlier email to me, and he had in previous presentations of the case used “summer 2000” as the general timeframe for Bowman’s initial involvement with the Leiningers. Bowman subsequently confirmed with me that her correspondence with Andrea Leininger began in February 2001, not summer 2000. 

September 27, 2021 Email to Bruce Leininger

Begin forwarded message:

From: Michael Sudduth <…………………. >

Subject: Research Query – Follow Up

Date: September 27, 2021 at 3:24:45 PM PDT

To: Bruce Leininger <………………..>

Hi Bruce:

Hope you’re well.

Just sending you a follow-up email to the one I sent you about a month ago. Earlier email is below with the questions I had and check-in on some items you were going to look up for me.

Thanks,

Michael

Begin forwarded message:

From: Michael Sudduth <……………..…>

Subject: Re: Research Query – Follow Up

Date: August 28, 2021 at 4:17:44 PM PDT

To: Bruce Leininger <……………….…>

Hi Bruce:

I’m just following up on your earlier helpful email. I see there’s a hurricane heading toward LA. Be safe. You’ve got a hurricane. Here in Northern California, we have fire, smoke, and a lot of ash.

Let me see if I can distill the questions we were discussing earlier. Most of these relate to my working out a detailed chronology of events, especially between February 2000 and late fall of 2002.

(1) You were going to look for the correspondence Andrea had with Carol Bowman, the earliest correspondence. I realize the summer of 2000 was a long time ago, but I’d be interested in looking at that correspondence to help fill out some details for a robust chronology of events.

(2) Do you have a DVD copy of the 2002 ABC TV program that never aired? <……………..> was the producer. I spoke with her and she indicated that ABC would be reluctant to grant access to the show because it was unaired (a bunch of liability issues), but that I’d have better luck asking you or Jim Tucker (whom I’m also asking).

(3) In connection with the 2002 ABC program, Tucker informed me that the segment on James didn’t include his giving the name “Natoma” or “Jack Larsen,” which is why Tucker didn’t include those important items in his list of claims documented in the interviews of the 2002 program. Do you recall why <……….> didn’t include those important details of what James had said to you and Andrea?

(4) After the 2000 Memorial Day visit to the Cavanaugh Flight Museum, did you ever take James back there again? If so, do you remember the approximate dates?

(5) You said you were going to look in your computer files for any early chronologies you put together. I believe you prepared one for John DeWitt and/or his daughter in fall 2003. Perhaps you can locate a copy of that, or any others you put together closer in time to the events.

(6) Do you know anything about Vintage Wings and Things that was located in Lafayette, LA. It was owned by David Jeansonne – a collector of vintage planes and cars – who unfortunately died in an aviation accident near Lafayette in February 2001.

(7) On page 174 of Soul Survivor, you make reference to a summer trip to Hawaii when James was four (hence summer 2002). Did you take him to the Pearl Harbor Aviation Museum?

Thanks, Bruce.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Michael Sudduth

Crash and Burn: James Leininger Story Debunked

James Leininger Reincarnation

“Debunk (verb): to show that something is less important, less good, or less true than it has been made to appear.” – Cambridge English Dictionary

Beginning at age two in the spring of 2000, James Leininger began exhibiting behaviors and making claims that his parents later believed resembled the life and death of World War II fighter pilot James Huston, Jr.  Over several years, James Leininger provided information about World War II, especially fighter planes, as well as specific details that seemed to match facts about Huston’s life.

The James Leininger story came to public attention in 2004. ABC Primetime featured the Leiningers’ story with Chris Cuomo as the correspondent. Shortly thereafter the story became all the rage. Various mainstream news networks have featured the story. It’s garnered waves of attention on social media, including dozens of glowing commentaries on YouTube. Then in 2009 Bruce and Andrea Leininger published Soul Survivor. In their book, the Leiningers  document the alleged evidence that their son is the reincarnation of Huston. After the publication of Soul Survivor, leading reincarnation researcher Jim Tucker investigated the case. In his blurb for the Leiningers’ book, Tucker said it’s a “spectacular example of the phenomenon of young children who seem to remember previous lives.”

The James Leininger story remains popular. The 2021 Netflix series Surviving Death featured it in episode six of the series. Scholarly attention, too. In November 2021 the Bigelow Institute announced that it had awarded Bruce Leininger $20,000 for an essay allegedly presenting the story of his son as the “best evidence” for life after death. Mr. Leininger goes as far as to call his story “definitive proof of reincarnation.”

James Leininger – Evidence for Reincarnation?

On the face of it, the Leininger case exhibits many of the strengths of an ideal case of the reincarnation type. First, the case involves a young child in western culture making veridical claims that seem to fit the life of a formerly living person. Second,  the Leiningers documented many of James’s claims before they identified James Huston, Jr. as the presumed previous personality. Third, James Leininger exhibited behavioral patterns resembling the alleged previous personality. Not surprisingly, many researchers and people who believe in life after death regard this case as one of the best documented cases of reincarnation.

Alas, it’s no such thing.

The James Leininger story is not “definitive proof” of reincarnation. It’s not the “best evidence” for reincarnation. It isn’t even modest evidence for reincarnation. It’s no evidence at all for reincarnation, unless, of course, we wish to trivialize the entire concept of evidence. 

There can, of course, be an appearance of evidence for any claim. Such appearances are often psychologically compelling. Be unaware of counter-evidence. Rely on falsehoods and factual distortions. Deploy fallacious or implausible reasoning. This easily makes what is false appear to be true. But what does not survive critical scrutiny should not be regarded as true. Such is the case with the James Leininger story. It doesn’t survive critical scrutiny. Whatever else it might be, it’s not evidence for reincarnation.

My Two-Year Investigation

I first read about the James Leininger case while writing my 2016 book on survival. I began a detailed investigation of the case in 2019. Between 2019 and 2021 I interviewed over a dozen people. I also acquired important documentation concerning the alleged facts of the case. I developed a detailed chronology of the alleged events based on multiple sources. Unlike other chronologies, my chronology includes a variety of contextual details. These include facts concerning plausible, if not obvious, ordinary sources of information which shaped James’s experiences, behaviors, and claims.

On January 17, 2022, the Journal of Scientific Exploration published my 34,000-word critical report on this case – “The James Leininger Case Re-examined” (Journal of Scientific Exploration, Vol. 35, No. 4, 2021). My paper is available on the JSE website Journal of Scientific Exploration and on my Cup of Nirvana website “The James Leininger Case Re-examined” (PDF).

My report also provides an analysis of the impact of my findings on Jim Tucker’s favorable assessment of this case. Tucker is a leading researcher on children who claim to have past-life memories. He is also the Director of the Division of Perceptual Studies (DOPS), University of Virginia Health System. Tucker’s investigation of the Leininger case is one of many such investigations Tucker and his DOPS’s colleagues have conducted over the years. They’re responsible for thousands of published pages documenting and analyzing such cases. Other researchers regularly cite the cases in the database at DOPS in their own work. And they cite Tucker’s analyses and conclusions.

Why the James Leininger Story is not Credible

The James Leininger story may seem credible, until you dig a little deeper. Things are not as the Leiningers present them. Their story is based on falsehoods, factual distortions, and fallacious reasoning. Here’s an outline of some of the case’s credibility problems. In my paper I develop and support these points with considerable testimonial, written, and photographic evidence. 

Falsehoods about James’s Experience

Ordinary sources of information which shaped James’s experience, behavior, and claims loom large in this case. Understandably so. As ordinary sources of information increase, the need for an exotic explanation in terms of reincarnation decreases. This is why reincarnation investigators and researchers attempt to rule out such sources. It’s also why the Leiningers have emphasized that nothing James saw or heard could have influenced him. They know their reincarnation story depends on this. And this is where their story, not even half told, already collapses under the weight of modest critical scrutiny.

  • The Leiningers have repeatedly denied that their son James was exposed to videos or images of planes on fire or combat scenes prior. Specifically, he allegedly didn’t see such images proximate to his nightmares of being a pilot trapped in a burning plane. This is false, and my paper discloses the sources and their content. These include the content of videos James watched and aviation museums he visited.
  • The Leiningers have attributed to James nearly two-dozen behaviors and claims occurring between 2000 and 2002. They claim that nothing James saw or read or heard could have influenced these behaviors or claims. This is false, and my paper discloses the sources and their content. The content of videos, aviation museums, and aviation events James participated in play an important role here.
  • The Leiningers indicate that they followed the advice of past-life therapist Carol Bowman. She instructed them to tell their son that what he was experiencing in his nightmares were events that had happened to him before. According to the Leiningers’ official 2009 narrative, they initially connected with Bowman in winter 2001. In the context of the Leiningers’ wider chronology of events, this was six to eight months after James began making specific past-life claims. This obviously raises the concern that the Leiningers, following Bowman’s advice, (unwittingly) influenced the evolving reincarnation narrative.

Narrative Redactions, Adjustments, and Alternative Facts

The James Leininger story nearly everyone knows about is a story the Leiningers evolved over many years beginning in 2002. They altered their story in multiple ways in the light of what they later discovered. Consequently, there really isn’t one James Leininger story. There are multiple versions of the story, and they contradict each other in crucial ways.

The narrative the Leiningers present in their 2009 book Soul Survivor is heavily redacted. The versions of the story they presented between 2002 and 2005 significantly differ from later iterations. These include changes to what James allegedly said and when he said it. Moreover, the changes represented in the 2009 account were made only after the Leiningers had discovered pertinent facts about the life and death of James Huston, Jr. The changes to the narrative result in a better fit with facts about the life and death of the alleged previous personality James Huston, Jr. The official Leininger story is a constructed narrative, crafted to fit facts the Leiningers later learned about James Huston.

Misrepresenting the Circumstances of James Huston’s Death

The Leiningers claim to present historical documentation concerning the circumstances of the death of World War II fighter pilot James M. Huston, Jr. The documentation is important because it allegedly confirms the claims the Leiningers attribute to their son. The changes to the claims the Leiningers attribute to their son provide a better fit with the facts. But the Leiningers also systematically misrepresent the content of primary-source documents and mask material that contradicts their narrative. They misquote or misrepresent several World War II documents and suppress the most detailed 1945 account of Huston’s death. As a result, they bury crucial facts that disconfirm their story. I present these facts and their historical documentation.

Jim Tucker’s Defective Investigation and Analysis

The credibility problems outlined above are not limited to the Leinigners’ version of their story. It extends to Jim Tucker’s presentation and analysis. Tucker investigated this case in 2010, after the Leiningers had published their book. Thereafter Tucker provided a favorable analysis of the case in multiple publications, including a 2016 case report. There are many YouTube videos of Tucker’s lectures in which he discusses the case. (See Tucker video 2016 @35:22, and Tucker video 2020 @42:58.) However, Tucker’s investigation of the case and his subsequent favorable analysis of it fails to consider any of the points above. They weren’t even on his radar. Tucker didn’t uncover the ordinary sources of information that shaped this case. His account also depends on considerable fact-fudging and historical inaccuracies. And he trusts the Leiningers as his primary witnesses. Consequently, Tucker’s claim that this case provides evidence for reincarnation is unwarranted.

The Importance of Conscientious Inquiry

Bruce Leininger has consistently portrayed himself as a skeptic who found the light. This has been one of the sexy selling points of the Leiningers’ story. But Bruce Leininger was never a skeptic. He initially rejected reincarnation – said it was “bullshit” – because of his conservative Christian beliefs. So, he rejected one bad idea because he accepted another bad idea. This isn’t skepticism. He later came to accept both bad ideas for no apparently good reason at all. This isn’t an illustration of a defeated skeptic. It’s an example of a lack of conscientiousness.

The James Leininger narrative is not evidence for the rebirth of a pilot who took his last flight on March 3, 1945. It’s a fiction James’s parents exaggerated into a robust narrative over several years. It’s a compelling story, yes. But not of reincarnation. It’s a compelling story of how confabulation, poor critical thinking skills, and a lack of attention to ordinary sources of information can converge to give the appearance of something remarkable but which is utterly pedestrian.

The habit of drawing bogus inferences from alternative facts has become all too common in our culture. The James Leininger story is a sad example of how this malady has infected inquiry into important questions surrounding consciousness and the prospects for life after death. I applaud Robert Bigelow’s interest in securing the best evidence for life after death. But this search leads nowhere unless we’re clear about what is not good evidence for life after death. This is how we cultivate conscientiousness in our inquiries into matters of ultimate importance. And it’s only conscientiousness that prevents us from promoting bullshit. And by “bullshit” here I mean bullshit in the Frankfurtian sense – that is, any speech act that does not have a proper regard for truth. “Bullshit” in this sense is not used as a term of abuse, but as a way to refer to a particular deceptive use of language (see Hary Frankfurt, On Bullshit.)

Blog Update 1/17/2022

In November 2021, the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies (BICS) awarded Bruce Leininger $20,000 for an essay in which he re-presented his nearly two-decade old story. BICS subsequently published his paper Consciousness Survives Physical Death: ‘Definitive Proof’ of Reincarnation.

On January 17, 2022 I published a detailed critique of Mr. Leininger’s prize-winning essay: Bruce Leininger’s ‘Definitive Proof’ of Reincarnation. This is a supplement to my longer JSE piece. 

Further Updates Spring 2022

In the spring 2022 issue of the Journal of Scientific Exploration, I provide a response to Jim Tucker’s reponse to my Leininger paper. Tucker’s reply further illustrates the  logical deficiencies that vitiate his discussions of the Leininger case elsewhere.

“Response to Jim Tucker,” Journal of Scientific Exploration, 36:1 (2022) 

Revised 2/07/2024

Interview on Arguments for Life after Death

Carlos Alvarado recently published an interview with me in his blog. The focus of the interview was my 2015 book on arguments for life after death – A Philosophical Critique of Arguments for Postmortem Survival (Palgave Macmillan, 2015). With Alvarado’s permission I have reproduced the interview below for my blog readers.

Interview

Alvarado: Can you give us a brief summary of the book?

Sudduth: The main objective of my book is to offer a critique of arguments for life after death. There are lots of arguments of this sort. I focus specifically on arguments based on data drawn from phenomena associated with near-death and out-of-body experiences, mediumship, and cases of the reincarnation type. I refer to these arguments as classical empirical arguments for survival.

Unlike other skeptical assessments of such arguments, my critique doesn’t challenge the alleged facts on which the arguments are based, nor do I argue that there is no life after death. Instead, I explore the kinds of assumptions the classical arguments require if they are to succeed in doing what their advocates claim on their behalf, namely, provide good evidence for survival. I argue that we have no good reason to accept these assumptions. Consequently, the classical arguments do not provide good evidence for personal survival.

That’s a general way of stating what I argue, but there are two more specific tiers of argument that make up the structure of my book. To understand these arguments, we should first be clear on what survivalists themselves have claimed about the case for survival. First, there’s an evidential probability claim: postmortem survival has a favorable net probability/plausibility based on the salient facts. In other words, survival is at least more probable than not, if not highly probable relative to the total evidence. Second, there’s an explanatory claim: survival provides the best explanation of the relevant facts. The two claims are interrelated because survivalists often assume that explanatory merit has evidential cash-value. They argue that survival is probable or very probable because it provides the best explanation of the data.

I argue that survivalists haven’t provided a good enough reason to believe either of the two main claims (in italics) above. Here it’s important to emphasize that I don’t argue that survival is not the best explanation of the data, nor that survival is improbable. I only argue that survivalists have failed to make good on their claims. Why? Because the arguments necessarily depend on assumptions that (1) we have no good reason to accept and (2) would be self-defeating to the case for survival, even if we accepted them.

What are these assumptions?

First, there are general assumptions about what the evidence for survival should look like. In the absence of such assumptions, there’s no plausible inference from features of the world to the claim that persons survive death. In much the same way, if I don’t know (or reasonably believe) what the evidence that Mr. X committed the crime should look like, I can’t plausibly regard any crime-scene fact as evidence that Mr. X committed the crime.

But second – and most fundamentally – there are fine-grained assumptions about what consciousness would probably be like if it should survive death. Without these assumptions, we could not say with any reasonable degree of assurance what would count as evidence for the survival of consciousness. These include assumptions about the memories, desires, intentions, and continuing perceptual and causal powers of surviving consciousness, as well as the conditions under which such powers can be exercised. I call these auxiliary assumptions since they’re not intrinsic to postulating the mere continuation of individual consciousness after death.

Since this is a crucial part of my argument, let me clarify. In postulating personal survival we’re postulating the persistence of consciousness and everything essential to individual consciousness. This includes whatever mental processes or content underwrites our sense of self. But this is logically consistent with the persistence of very little autobiographical memory or none at all. Nor is this a mere theoretical possibility. It’s precisely what happens in dream states, dissociative fugue, and other forms of amnesia. And what’s true of memory here is also true of our wider psychology – for example, our desires, intentions, personality traits, and skills. The content in consciousness is very fluid even over short periods of time, as are its behavioral manifestations. So, even if we suppose that postmortem consciousness is likely to exhibit the same general features antemortem consciousness exhibits, we really can’t say with any reasonable degree of assurance what we should expect survival evidence to look like in any particular case. We only get there by making further assumptions.

So simple survival does not logically entail (nor make probable) a surviving self that retains all the right stuff: the stock of memories, desires, intentions, and perceptual abilities and causal powers required for ongoing lifelike interactions with our world and that would justify identifying a person as the same as (or the continuation of) some previous personality. We need auxiliary assumptions to bulk up a generic or simple survival hypothesis (or theory) into a more conceptually robust hypothesis (or theory) that can plausibly account for the data.

I argue that simple survival – postulating the mere persistence of individual consciousness after death – explains nothing because there’s no fact about the world it would lead us to expect or not to expect. For example, simple survival doesn’t lead us to expect on-going veridical perceptions of our world, causal interactions with our world, or any of the individual memory and personality features the data allegedly exhibit and that survival is invoked to explain.

What’s needed is a robust survival hypothesis, but that’s problematic. There are lots of assumptions we can make about what surviving consciousness might be like. After all, as explained above, consciousness in our antemortem state is highly variable, even for the same person. But the assumptions we make about what postmortem consciousness will be like affects the extent to which the data are what we would expect if survival is true. That in turn affects the explanatory power of the survival hypothesis. At present there’s no rational basis for privileging survival assumptions that would lead us to expect the data, and no rational basis for favoring such assumptions over alternative assumptions – equally consistent with survival – that would not lead us to expect the data.

But also, there’s no sufficient reason for favoring the kinds of assumptions needed for a successful survival argument over the kinds of assumptions that would empower proposed counter-explanations of the data and thereby undermine survival arguments. For example, the assumptions that would empower living-agent psi explanations are no less reasonable than as those required for survival arguments. Survivalists will deny this parity, of course, but I’ve tried to show that this denial isn’t plausible.

It’s important to remember that the survival hypothesis will be the best explanation of the data only if it better explains the data than do alternative non-survival hypotheses. I argue that survival can’t explain the data without being bulked up, and it can’t be the best explanation of the data if it’s bulked up. Why the latter? Because the kinds of kinds of reasons survivalists adduce to rule out counter explanations also rule out a bulked-up survival hypothesis.

Let me illustrate the point. Take the standard two-tiered strategy to rule out the appeal to living-agent psychic functioning. On the one hand, survivalists like to point out that living-agent psi can’t account for persons possessing linguistic skills characteristic of a previous personality, the motivation for mediums to impersonate the deceased or confabulate communications with them, or – in cases of the reincarnation type – for persons possessing information about a pervious personality in the form of memories. On the other hand, when a living-agent psi hypothesis is bulked up with assumptions drawn from psychology regarding motivational dynamics, dissociative phenomena, rare mnemonic gifts, and the sudden manifestation of linguistic skills not previously evidenced, then survivalists complain that these assumptions are ad hoc, introduce unnecessary complexity, or lack adequate independent support.

As I see it, survivalists either exploit the explanatory limitations that trivially apply to a simple version of the living-agent psi hypothesis or they object to the assumptions used to bulk up such a hypothesis so that it can explain the data. I show that these objections are equally applicable (if not more so) to the assumptions required for any robust survival hypothesis to explain the data.

What’s especially important to appreciate here is how the survivalist is often engaged in a (perhaps unconscious) logical sleight of hand that masks the self-defeating nature of his reasoning. Survivalists routinely contrast a simple survival hypothesis and a robust living-agent psi hypothesis to show that living-agent psi – unlike survival – is overly complex and relies on assumptions that are ad hoc or lack independent support. But when survivalists wish to focus on the explanatory advantages of the survival hypothesis, they contrast a simple living-agent psi hypothesis (which explains very little) and a robust interpretation of survival. And they usually don’t acknowledge the conceptual cost of achieving the alleged explanatory advantages. As a result, they miss how the kind of survival hypothesis that adequately accommodates the data requires assumptions that are at least as complex, ad hoc, and lacking in the way of independent support as those adopted by the defender of the living-agent psi hypothesis in the interest of accommodating the data.

So, contrary to how some reviewers of my book have presented my position, I do not claim that living-agent psi is a better an explanation of the data, only that survivalists are in a particularly poor position to argue that it’s not. And the same holds for other counter-explanations of the data.

I apply similar considerations to argue that classical empirical arguments for survival as far back as C.J. Ducasse fail to show that survival is more probable than not, much less highly probable. I develop this line of argument in considerable detail using different models of evidential probability used in confirmation theory (the logic of evidence assessment). All three forms of survival argument I consider converge on the same basic conceptual problem: the unjustified inclusion and exclusion of auxiliary assumptions required to underwrite what survivalists have wanted to say on behalf of the survival hypothesis.

Alvarado: What is your background in parapsychology, and with the topic of the book specifically? 

Sudduth: I’m a philosopher by profession and academic training, with concentrations in epistemology, logic, metaphysics, and philosophy of religion. But I’ve had something of a life-long interest in anomalous phenomena, especially phenomena suggestive of survival, based on personal experiences and philosophical reflection.

I developed an interest in the work on survival by H.H. Price, C.D. Broad, and C.J. Ducasse after reading John Hick’s book Death and Eternal Life in graduate school at Oxford. When I started teaching philosophy and religion courses, I incorporated the topic of survival in a lot of my classes, eventually using it as a regular narrative in some of my classes for many years. During that time, I did the bulk of the research on the topical territory of my book.

While the book reading was helpful, I also benefited from a decade of conversations with parapsychologists and fellow philosophers who have worked and published on this topic. I’ve also joined parapsychologists on some field investigations over the years (with Loyd Auerbach, for example), and I’ve critically examined mediums firsthand. I’ve also personally experienced a broad range of ostensibly paranormal phenomena.

The first half of my academic career was devoted to applying developments in epistemology, logic, and philosophy of science in the exploration of questions in the justification religious belief and arguments for the existence of God. After my first book on this topic, I shifted my focus to life after death, philosophy of mind, and a broad range of issues in psychology.

I think my academic training in Anglo-American philosophy, together with an extensive educational and teaching background in Eastern and Western religious traditions, has enhanced my approach to the topic of survival.

Alvarado: What motivated you to write this book?

Sudduth: Three things.

First, it was the natural result of a decade-long inquiry during which time my views changed. I started as a survivalist who thought the arguments for survival were good. I became a survivalist who thought the arguments were defective upon closer scrutiny. I ended up concluding that the arguments were more defective than I initially thought, unable to accomplish what their proponents claim on their behalf. I’m no longer a survivalist – I neither affirm nor deny survival – though I remain open to future evidence persuading me. I suspect that evidence will come from cognitive neuroscience and technological developments in artificial intelligence, not parapsychology.

Second, following the lead of C.D. Broad and H.H. Price, I wanted to critically explore the conceptual aspects of reasoning about survival. The literature has emphasized the empirical dimensions of research, the so-called facts, but as is often the case it’s not the facts that divide people but the interpretation of the facts. I wanted to go right to that. That’s what philosophers do. We try to unearth the deeper strata of assumptions that drive a line of reasoning. This allows a more effective assessment of the coherence and plausibility of the underlying commitments and argumentation.

Third, and related to the above, I wanted to write a book that treated the topic with more logical rigor than has typically been the case in the literature over the past thirty years. Much of the literature, the bulk of it I’d say, is little more than a heap of facts and a hasty, if not opaque, inference to survival as being “probable” or “the best explanation.” Survivalists place far too much emphasis on how counter-explanations allegedly fail, but they’re deficient in showing how the survival hypothesis succeeds. Even the importance of this distinction is often not on their conceptual radar. As a philosopher, I’m interested in how we make good arguments and justify claims about evidence, probability, and the explanatory merit of hypotheses and theories. I’ve found the bulk of the literature at this juncture underwhelming at best.

It is unclear why survivalists have so frequently lacked logical rigor in their treatment of the topic. My charitable reading is that they’re calibrating their publications for popular consumption. That has its place of course, but it can become a liability, a conceptual bypass that sidesteps the crucial questions rather than advances the discussion with the appropriate critical scrutiny.

Alvarado: Why do you think your book is important and what do you hope to accomplish with it?

Sudduth: I think the importance of my book is its approach. It’s a new approach to long-standing, widely discussed arguments. And it provides a new analysis of why the classical empirical arguments for survival are defective. I hope this will encourage survivalists and non-survivalists alike to recalibrate their arguments in the light of my critique. That’s a good way to move the dialogue forward.

Outside academic philosophy, the bulk of the literature on survival since the latter part of the 1960s has been almost exclusively focused on presenting data (allegedly suggestive of survival), but the literature has neglected to adequately engage a variety of conceptual issues involved in evidence assessment and explanatory reasoning. As a result, there’s been a disconnect between the data and the kind of argument that’s required to justifiably maintain that the data are good evidence for survival. My book addresses this head on.

Otherwise put, I’m addressing architectural or structural issues in the reasoning about survival. What’s required for survival to be the best explanation of the data? What’s required to “rule out” out counter-explanations? What does it even mean to rule out counter-explanations? When are we reasonable to conclude that evidence makes a hypothesis probable? When highly probable? What kinds of assumptions are built into such reasoning?

To be sure, other books have provided useful informal explorations of some of these questions, but they’ve neglected to dial-in some of the crucial conceptual issues – for example, the role of auxiliary assumptions in hypothesis/theory testing and how this impacts the argument for survival.

But also, I’ve offered a rigorous formal treatment of the classical arguments for survival, something that Broad and Ducasse hinted at in their day. I’ve addressed the favorable probability claims made on behalf of survival by examining these claims through the lenses of the two most widely adopted models of evidential probability – Likelihoodism and Bayesianism. It’s somewhat surprising that survivalists haven’t already done this. After all, many of them rely on and invoke Bayesian principles – for example, referring to prior probabilities in trying to assess the total probability of survival relative to the evidence. And those who don’t invoke Bayesian principles typically rely on Likelihoodist principles, which provide a metric for determining when evidence favors one hypothesis over another.

Oddly, a few reviewers didn’t care for my deployment of the resources of confirmation theory, but they missed the implications of their own critique. As I show, it’s survivalists who tacitly or overtly rely on the assumptions that confirmation theory explicates and systematizes. The formal techniques of confirmation theory create no problems that aren’t already inherent in the informal assumptions about evidence. So if there’s a problem here, it’s a problem for survivalists who rely on Bayesian or Likelihoodist measures for assessing evidence. Naturally I agree that such assumptions make it difficult, if not impossible, for survivalists to justify their claims about the survival hypothesis. However, in the absence of arguments for survival that rely on different, more plausible assumptions about the nature of evidence and how we assess it, survivalist claims look more like wishes and hopes than the conclusions of serious argumentation.

I would also emphasize how my analysis provides results that are provocative and immune to the typical strategies survivalists deploy in defense of their arguments.

First, on my view, arguments for survival are challenged for reasons that have nothing to do with positions in philosophy of mind. This is important because survivalists routinely devote a lot of space to trying to debunk so-called materialist philosophies of mind. But neither my arguments nor their cogency depends on any particular position in philosophy of mind. For example, I argue that the classical arguments fail to show that survival is more probable than not, but without the assumption that materialism is true. In fact, my arguments work even if we assume that materialism is false.

Second, I show that survival arguments fail even if we don’t treat survival as antecedently improbable. Some prominent survivalists claim that critics of survival stack the deck by assigning a very low initial probability to the survival hypothesis. I don’t do that. For example, I show that the classical arguments will still fail to show that survival is more probable than not, even if we begin with the generous assumption that survival is as probable as not.

Third, survival arguments fail even if rival non-survival explanations are antecedently improbable. This is significant because some survivalists think rival explanations of the data can be reasonably invoked only if we assume that such explanations are initially plausible or even more plausible than survival. Or, at any rate, that such counter-explanations couldn’t pose a serious challenge to survival arguments unless we invested them with initial plausibility. This is not true. For example, I argue that the appeal to living-agent psi can challenge survival arguments even if this exotic counter-explanation strains credulity and is antecedently very improbable.

Finally, I show that classical explanatory survival arguments are self-defeating. They must show that survival explains the data, and that rival explanations do not explain the data as well as the survival hypothesis does. But, as explained above, I show that survivalists typically rule out counter-explanations for reasons that equally apply to any formulation of a survival hypothesis or theory that has a ghost of chance of explaining anything at all.

As I said above, when I set out to write my book, it was my hope that I would provide an analysis and set of arguments that would advance the survival debate, perhaps only a smidgeon. To that prospect I think I must say at present what C.D. Broad said about survival: “one can only wait and see, or alternatively (which is no less likely) wait and not see.”

You: A Review

You_Kepnes

 

“You’re going to be so sorry when you realize what you made me do . . . the good news is I have no regrets.” – Joe Goldberg

I was fortunate to read three great psychological thrillers in 2017. Caroline Kepnes’s debut novel You (Atria/Emily Bestler Books, 2014) tops the list.

You is an engrossing psychological thriller told from the perspective of a man who skillfully uses modern technology to evolve a romantic relationship with a woman who is his latest obsession. The story is a masterful and witty character-driven thriller rich in its grasp of human nature and portrayal of psychopathology.

 

Synopsis

Joe Goldberg manages a used bookstore in New York. He loves books and he loves the woman who just walked through the door.  Her name is Guinevere Beck, but she goes by Beck. She’s a twenty-something aspiring writer enrolled in a graduate writing program.  Joe is immediately attracted to  her, and after they engage in some literature-centered banter, they’ve bonded. He’s hooked, but his attraction is obsessive, and it quickly evolves into a meticulous and elaborate stalking scheme, which will turn deadly more than once.

The story is written from Joe’s perspective, in the form of an on-going internal monologue directed at Beck, addressed throughout as you. The reader follows Joe’s plotting and the unfolding of events from inside his head, all in the present tense.

Joe knows her name and that’s enough to get him started. With the aid of Internet sleuthing—“the Internet was designed with love,” he says—he locates Beck’s on-line blogs, Twitter and Facebook accounts, each rich with autobiographical details. He locates where she lives and begins watching her from across the street. Soon he’s sneaking into her apartment, rummaging through her things, getting more information about her, and taking a few mementos here and there too.

It’s not a coincidence when Joe pulls Beck from the subway tracks onto which she falls drunk late one night. He officially befriends her, yes, the guy from the bookstore. He sees her home with a cab ride. Later she’ll realize she’s lost her cell phone. She thinks she dropped it in the chaos of the night. No, Joe has stolen it.  He hacks her emails and social media sites. Now he has direct access to the intimate details of her life, including her whereabouts, likes and dislikes, relationship history, circle of friends, and the guy Benji she’s presently in-and-out with romantically.  This knowledge is power.

Joe is determined to raise their friendship to the next level. The end game is being Beck’s boyfriend, her primary, but this requires overcoming a variety of obstacles created by Beck’s inner circle of friends and her wavering affection for Benji. But Joe is resourceful. He’s as skilled at using information for his purposes as he is at acquiring it. He’s also determined. There are no limits to what he’ll do to get her.  Since he’s convinced Beck needs him as much as he needs her, he perceives his actions as good for her too.  So he neutralizes—and in some cases eliminates—the obstacles. He succeeds, and soon Beck falls for Joe. Boy gets girl.

Joe’s a smart guy. He knows he can lose what he has, and this fear is compelling, especially when another man appears to have entered Beck’s life. Obsessive love is possessive love. So Joe’s pathological manipulation evolves with greater ingenuity to cope with the shifting threats he perceives. Again, despite the risks, there are no limits to what he’ll do to hold onto Beck, to protect her and their relationship. Although the obstacles prove formidable and their relationship becomes turbulent, Joe remains committed. He manages to neutralize and eliminate the obstacles once again. As before, his obsession proves deadly. The boy who gets girl must also keep girl, whatever the cost.

The reader knows Joe’s scheming will not end well, but it’s hard to anticipate the details of just how badly it will end. In the end, there’s a body count and a single mug of piss Joe will regret.

The Psychology of You

As the plethora of raving reviews of You demonstrate, there’s much to praise about the novel. Kepnes’ debut novel showcases her talents as an innovative, insightful, and inspirational writer. She sustains a well-paced and artfully crafted story with a strong, intriguing, and easily likable narrative voice. The story is an unsettling but thoroughly entertaining character study of what happens when a toxic narcissist falls in love. Other characters, though viewed from Joe’s perspective, are also well developed, especially Beck and her pretentious wealthy college friend Peach Sallinger.

Kepnes-164-201x300What’s most interesting about the character development in You is that Joe—obsessed man turned romantic predator turned killer—is a guy with lots of positive qualities. He’s charming, quirky, full of passion, and well read. He’s not all bad. Similarly, the other characters are not entirely good; in fact some of them are quite rotten. Kepnes’ characters are flawed people—pretentious, narcissistic, deceptive, and conniving. Some of them are in the grip of their own destructive psychopathologies. As a result, Kepnes dissolves the traditional clear-cut dichotomy between villain and victim, and replaces it with a more realistic view of human persons and the complexities of moral assessment. Also, in portraying Beck as a strong yet deeply flawed person, Kepnes breaks from the stalker cliché of the powerful male predator victimizing the innocent or virtuous powerless women.

The story’s character development points to what for me is the book’s strongest and most fascinating feature. You is a thriller that skillfully exhibits psychological depth and insight.

Kepnes has created a central character whose dangerous obsessions are intimately connected to the more widespread phenomenon of idealizing love and human relationships. Joe is a special case of this, the inflation of obsession and possessive love. He’s a malignant narcissist, controlled by the on-going need to secure validation of himself and his unrealistic romantic ideals. In Joe we see the fruit of passion eviscerated of empathy: an elaborate and evolving stalking scheme turned deadly. But this psychological dynamic is an inflation of tendencies most of us share.  This is both insightful and also unsettling to the self-aware reader.

Also, true to the narcissist’s cognitive situation, Joe’s mind is a disturbing mix of insight and delusion.

On the one hand, Joe understands what makes people tick. He understands how people’s beliefs, needs, and interests motivate them. Since the story is told exclusively from Joe’s point of view, the reader is privy to his feelings, thoughts, and perceptions, so we can see how his insights into the world and people facilitate his effective plotting. He sees through pretentious rich kids and millennials, and even a therapist who appears later in the story.

On the other hand, recurring delusions fueled by his emotional flux interrupt his otherwise lucid engagement with the world, and his fantasy life takes over. Sometimes he idealizes people and relationships; in other cases he demonizes them. Like the borderline personality type, Joe’s delusions are reinforced and perpetuated by a cycle of inner rumination fueled by his emotional flux. He is easily triggered and can flip on you at any moment.

Of course, it’s not just the robust psychology of the characters in the story I find compelling.  It’s also the level of psychological insight required for this kind of a story to put a deep hook in the reader.

Kepnes knows how to create a narrator who is a horrible person and yet likable. Lots of readers have said how likable—some even say lovable—Joe is.  They enjoyed being in the head of a guy who is a sexual predator who turns serial killer. I remember the WTF moment when I realized “oh shit, I really like this dude.”

Cultivating an intimate connection between the reader and this kind of narrator is difficult, but Kepnes pulls it off. Yes, this is partly fueled by Kepnes portraying Joe’s ostensible victims as narcissistic shit heels whom we love to hate, and some of whom we might even feel deserve  some ruthless punishment.  But it’s also because Joe is a bad guy in whom we find many good qualities too. We like the things he likes and we hate the things he loathes. We like Joe.  He’s funny and insightful, and perhaps we even admire his romantic ideals and his knack for calling out people’s bullshit and getting back at them.  We care what happens to him.  We cheer for him . . . almost all the way.  Yeah, there’s that one thing, the deal breaker in real life. He’s a serial murderer.  Consequently, the story is peppered with brilliant moments of moral ambiguity.

The likability of Joe is interesting from another vantage point. Our attraction to Joe suggests why we might be vulnerable to the traps of malignant narcissists in real life. Joe is smart, charming, validating, funny, and apparently empathetic and sacrificing. Everything we like about Joe is what we like about real people. But like Joe, many of these “perfect” people have a dangerous darker side. The real world abounds with Joes, just as attractive, just as dangerous. Joe could be anyone out there, even our closest friend or partner.  This makes You both compelling and chilling.

We might also find it unsettling to realize how much of Joe is in us. Perish the thought of it, right? Not quite. Why else would we so strongly relate to him and cheer for him?  Some may find this disturbing or terrifying, but it can also be liberating for much the same reason all good horror fiction is liberating. As Robert Bloch said, “Horror is the removal of masks.” You does this. It unmasks everyone, including the reader. It removes masks and reveals the darker territory of our own inner landscape, but it does so in a way that’s romantic, playful, and at times hilarious. You allows us to dance in the dark.

There’s more Joe Goldberg in Kepnes’ sequel novel, Hidden Bodies (You #2), and later this year Joe will come to the screen when the Lifetime network premiers a mini-series based on You.

Michael Sudduth

Behind Her Eyes: A Review

51OdDAMkEtL._SX315_BO1,204,203,200_Sarah Pinborough, Behind Her Eyes (Flatiron Books, 2017).

Behind Her Eyes is an extremely well written thriller with character depth and psychological insight. It incorporates a well-crafted narrative with ostensible paranormal phenomena and edge-of-your-seat twists that will leave your head spinning. You might find yourself slamming the book closed at the end and screaming—what the fuck just happened to me? 

The novel is as captivating as it is emotionally disturbing.  A love-triangle thriller taken to an entirely new level of intrigue and creepiness. You might even say diabolical madness too.

Sarah Pinborough has written a brilliant novel.

Synopsis (Without Spoilers)

Louise is a divorced single mother starting a new part-time job as a secretary in a medical facility. David is a doctor at the clinic and also Louise’s boss. Adele is David’s stay-at-home wife living in a marriage strained from the emotional baggage of distant and not-so-distant past.

It all begins with a kiss, an indiscretion.

Out for drinks one night on the eve of starting her new job, Louise kisses a man she’s fallen for at a pub. On her first day at work, she discovers the man she kissed is her boss and he’s married. After confronting the awkwardness of their situation—David is as surprised as Louise—the two resolve to move forward in their professional roles and pretend the indiscretion never happened. Fail. That’s not going to happen.

Louise has an apparent happenstance encounter with Adele and the two become friends. At Adele’s request, they agree not to tell David about their friendship. Now there are two secrets.  Then another: unable to control their desires, Louise and David end up sleeping together; not once, but repeatedly.

So Louise finds herself in the doubly awkward and morally challenging situation of sleeping with her best friend’s husband and Louise hasn’t told David about her friendship with his wife.  She’s wracked with guilt and confusion. Should she tell Adela about her affair with David? How to end that? Should she tell David about her  relationship with Adele? Her psychological struggle deepens when she begins to suspect that David is an alcoholic who is after Adele’s money and controlling her with manipulative tactics, including keeping her doped up on various prescription drugs.

We discover early on that Adele somehow knows about her husband’s on-going affair with Louise, yet she says nothing to either of them. Why? Because, as she confesses (to the reader), everything is going as she (Adele) has planned. That’s right. Adele has hatched some sort of bizarre scheme, and the affair between Louise and David is part of the plan. She pursues her friendship with Louise with passion and commitment, deepening their emotional bond, going out of her way to help Louise lose weight and conquer a sleep disorder.

Adele learned a technique for curing sleep disorders when she was in a mental institute as a teenager, recovering from a nervous breakdown after the death of her parents in a house fire. Together with a friend named Rob (another patient in the institute), Adele experimented with lucid dreaming and out-of-body experiences.   This turns out to be a crucial component of her plan and the linchpin of the wider narrative.

What is Adele scheming? Why?

No spoilers here.  I’ll only say this.  There are several crucial lines in the story that point the reader in the general direction. David says of Adele at one point—one of my favorite lines of the book—“In her own twisted, fucked-up way, she loves me. She always has and she always will” (p. 277).

What’s Great about this Novel?

Behind Her Eyes is an impressive demonstration of story telling, probably the best psychological thriller I’ve read.

The personality and psychodynamics of the three main characters are well developed, and their intentions and behaviors are plausibly motivated. There’s much here that’s rooted in real life.  The behaviors of the main characters serve genuine needs and interests, as well as fuel psychologically insightful conflicts. Then there are all the ambiguities of real life, especially the more extreme manifestations people appearing to be other than they are. Pinborough nicely crafts alternating first-person points of view that convey an intimate portrait of Louise and Adele. Each has a very strong character voice.

img_0062Pinborough masterfully deploys “misleading evidence,” a crucial aspect of a good psychological thriller. Throughout the novel it appears that characters have motives and intentions that we subsequently discover they do not have. Characters are not who they seem to be. Appearances deceive. And not just from the viewpoint of the characters. For much of the novel the reader is a participant in the experience of interpretive ambiguity and misdirection.

One of my favorite quotes from the book sums this up: “It’s strange how different we all appear to who we really are” (Louise, p. 139).  Radical opacity. An inner world standing in complete contradiction to our outer face. The source of much suffering.

For much of the story there’s an intentional ambiguity as to whether ostensible out-of-body experiences are genuine paranormal experiences or merely hallucinatory in nature. However, Pinborough doesn’t leave this aspect of the story open-ended. It’s nicely resolved in the latter part of the story, initially suggested and then directly disclosed.

The book nicely handles backstory, seamlessly weaving it into the wider narrative. Alternating first-person points of view tell the front story. A recurring third-person point of view supplies the important backstory: Adele’s time in a psychiatric institute in her teens, shortly after the death of her parents in a house fire, and the evolution of her friendship with another resident in the institute, a guy named Rob. The digressions into backstory are diachronic in nature.  The reader sees the backstory in brief clips moving forward in time, building up to a pivotal past event that’s the key to the novel’s front story.

Yes, the ending was a stunner. Neither the first nor the second twist is implausible given the wider narrative. It’s a believable ending, but it’s nonetheless surprising. The clues were there all along but well concealed. That’s part of the beauty of this book. The pieces of the puzzle only come together at the end.

When I finished the book, I slammed it shut, threw it down, and blurted out “this fucked me up.” It did. It blew my mind.  I was disturbed, and yet I smiled. A pleasurable mind fuck. That’s what it was. And what a wonderful thing that is.

Michael Sudduth

Gel – New Book Announcement

IMG_0326I’m pleased to announce the completion of my third book, a psychological horror-thriller novel called Gel.

As explained last year in Stephen King and the Path of Fiction, I’ve devoted considerable time to fiction since fall 2015. One of the reasons I’ve not blogged much in the past year is that I’ve devoted considerable time to reading and writing fiction. The discipline helped me produce Gel and make substantial progress on two other novels.

Gel reflects my long-standing interests in abnormal psychology, horror fiction, and phenomena suggestive of life after death. The narrative presents an apparent case of reincarnation entangled in strands of childhood trauma, psychopathology, and sadomasochistic eroticism. The story unfolds around three main characters—three people with three obsessions, yet one shared secret has haunted each of them for twenty-five years. Now their previously separate lives are converging and unraveling under the power of unresolved guilt and the desire for control and personal justice.

The novel also explores some interesting philosophical questions. Throughout I’ve wrestled with closely allied problems in the interface between personal identity and the reality/appearance distinction. People are often pretenders, or they at least have an aspect of their lives that remains hidden or opaque, perhaps even to themselves. This phenomenon looms large in Gel.  The narrative also expresses my curiosity about the moral and psychological complexities of having empathy for perpetrators of evil.

In my 2016 Review of Paul Tremblay’s A Head Full of Ghosts I discussed the horror of ambiguity. Gel is an example of this approach to dark fiction. Unlike much traditional horror fiction, the narrative of Gel doesn’t assume the actual existence of the supernatural (or the paranormal), though the story is replete with the appearance of it. Neither does the narrative deny the existence of supernatural entities or forces. Gel doesn’t resolve the tension that exists between naturalistic and super-naturalistic interpretations of the phenomena within the story. It intentionally deploys ambiguity as a literary device. The reader is left to grapple with the question and to consider the possibility that the origin of the terror eludes our understanding.

For example, one of the main characters in Gel may be the reincarnation of a seductive high school English teacher who died tragically twenty-five years earlier. But it’s also possible that pathological self-deception and improbable circumstances have coalesced to create the illusion of reincarnation. Then there’s the recurring phenomenon of the gel, also the title of the story. Is the gel merely a natural phenomenon—a coincidence in the bluster of human-made madness—or is it the manifestation of an otherworldly diabolical force,  a force ultimately responsible for the madness and the wider narrative of the story?

These questions remain open-ended from the viewpoint of the narrator of the story. The reader must wrestle with the relative merits of competing explanations. The reader must also consider the possibility that their own interpretive preferences at this juncture are a product of their wider psychology, controlled as it often is by their own interests, needs, and emotional life.

At present I’m editing Gel in preparation for a beta-version of the novel that should be available in late July or early August. At that time I’ll post a synopsis of the book. If you’d like to be considered as a beta-reader, please email me. Include some background on authors you’ve read and your literary interests. If you’re interested in horror fiction or psychological thrillers, the novel may interest you. If you’re uncomfortable  with explicit language and graphic sex, Gel is not for you.

Michael Sudduth

Exclusivist Anti-Exclusivist Apologetics

IMG_0326Farhan Qureshi recently posted a video on his YouTube channel in which he discussed my 2011 movement from Christianity to the Indian bhakti tradition of Vaishnavism. Qureshi discusses my  conversion story because he has a broader interest.  He’s interested in raising awareness about the dangers religious exclusivism and challenging the exclusivist paradigm.

The religious exclusivist takes the view that only the narrative of his own particular religious tradition is true, or that his particular religious tradition provides the only path to salvation. Religious exclusivism is also associated with the missionary goal of converting people to one’s own religion.

Qureshi has several interesting and I think correct things to say about the dangers of religious exclusivism. While I agree with some of his criticisms, I have reservations about his approach.

First, though, a preliminary point about my own spiritual journey. I don’t self-identify with any particular religious or spiritual tradition. Yes, I was a Vaishnav for about three years, but I haven’t considered myself a Vaishnav since late 2013. I spent a year and a half living in a Zen community and engaging in Zen practice (June 2014 to December 2015), but I didn’t consider myself a Buddhist then, nor am I a Buddhist now. In Helen De Cruz’s interview with me (2015), I provide the most recent detailed account of my spiritual journey. It approximates where I stand today.  So the title of Qureshi’s video (“Christian Scholar Converts to Hinduism, Dr. Michael Sudduth”) is somewhat misleading.

The more interesting part of Qureshi’s video is his more general discussion of religious exclusivism. He makes it clear that he aims to challenge the exclusivist paradigm. Writing with reference to Suni Muslims and Evangelical Christians in particular, he says that he aims to make these people realize how “deluded” and “selfish” their beliefs are. He illustrates this from his personal experiences of encounters with exclusivists.  Among other things, he says, “With loving kindness and no animosity in mind I told them your beliefs are evil . . . vile . . . demonic.”

While I’m sympathetic to Qureshi’s concern about the dangers of religious exclusivism, I find his goal problematic.  I also think his methodology is going to be psychologically ineffective and potentially self-defeating.

A few things are worth noting here.

First, it’s notoriously difficult to reason people out of their deeply held convictions. Religious exclusivists tend to hold their convictions with considerable tenacity.  So the goal of trying to reason exclusivists out of their beliefs is problematic on general psychological grounds. Moreover, we only compound the general difficulty here if we tell people that their deeply held convictions are demonic, vile, and delusional.  It’s hard to see how such an approach is going to be effective in helping people realize anything. In fact, it’s more likely to entrench them further in their convictions. Labeling people’s beliefs with morally demeaning terminology is bound to validate the fears and suspicions exclusivist beliefs are designed to alleviate in the first place. We basically validate exclusivism by a frontal assault.

Second, I have to wonder whether the passion behind Qureshi’s anti-exclusivist apologetic isn’t itself a species of the same thing he’s opposing. Worse yet, it potentially masks this fact.

Qureshi points out that tribalism drives exclusivism. Indeed, but of course that’s because tribalism is intrinsic to human nature and has been essential to our evolution as a species. It is primitive, yes; but much that is in us is and will remain primitive.  This is not confined to religious exclusivism. Tribalism is bound up in our general psychology, specifically our aversion to fear and insecurity. Attachment to an identity offers a kind of insulator or buffer against perceived threats.  It’s a kind of security blanket in which we wrap ourselves.  The communal expression of this is a social identity. There’s safety in numbers, in being a member of an in-group.  The demonizing of the beliefs and practices outside our group is symptomatic of the power of fear and insecurity.

So I have to ask what is motivating the use of morally demeaning language like “vile” and “demonic” to characterize religious exclusivists. What is motivating this pathos to snuff out the enemy, to rid the world of these delusional beliefs? It’s one thing to characterize people’s beliefs as false, implausible, or unwarranted (and in a clinical sense, we can speak of delusional beliefs), but it’s quite another matter to use terms like “vile” and “demonic.” These are highly evocative, emotionally charged terms. And they are precisely the same terms religious exclusivists use to denigrate the beliefs of non-exclusivists. From a purely psychological point of view, it’s difficult not to see Qureshi as more like his ostensible enemies than he makes himself out to be.

There’s a reason why the mystical traditions have not cared to engage in some large-scale attack on religious exclusivism, a fact that Qureshi appears to lament. It’s because practitioners in those traditions don’t perceive the existence of people with different beliefs than their own as a threat.  This is because they have softened their narcissistic tendencies and cultivated the grace of empathy. They’ve learned to let the exclusivist’s mockeries and criticisms pass through them.

Personally, I have no interest in refuting or otherwise challenging religious exclusivists. Yes, we can play the game of logical chess and sharpen our intellect by wielding our philosophical acumen to beat down our opponent’s “vile” and “deluded” beliefs. But do we really accomplish anything here other than temporarily quieting our own insecurities?

Having been an exclusivist, I understand the appeal it can have. I also understand the futility of trying to force people (intellectually or otherwise) out of their deeply held convictions. And I realize that like all other humans I have my own exclusivist tendencies. To the extent that I’m consumed with assaulting religious exclusivists I may be masking my exclusivist tendencies, tendencies that would plausibly motivate my own attack on exclusivism. This is why I’ve declined to say much about these issues since 2012.

That being said, I do understand Qureshi’s need to assault religious exclusivists.  But I think apologists against religious exclusivism might benefit by asking, “what is my ultimate intention here?” Even the protest against exclusivism can be primitive in origin. Fear can drive exclusivist apologetics, and it can also drive the more virulent opposition to it. Most importantly, it can short-circuit the one thing that’s needed. What’s needed is conversation, not assault. We need to cultivate the art of dialogue not counter-terrorist military-style tactics.

How do we have this conversation?

One precondition would be our becoming more conscious of our own tribalism and the psychology that drives it. What we despise most in the exclusivist may be what we’ve been unable to see and accept in ourselves. If we can tap into our own personal exclusivism, we might have more effective conversation with those who are exclusivist in their own way. Empathy, not argument, is a balm on fear.  In the end, this can help filter and regulate the more deleterious effects tribalism has, whilst avoiding the implausible and self-defeating goal of trying to eradicate it.

The invitation to conversation with exclusivists is at the end of the day an invitation to have a discussion with people who are very much like us in their basic psychology. No one of us is above the fallen angels of our nature. This is the central insight of the mystical traditions Qureshi otherwise lauds.

Michael Sudduth