Meet The American Psychiatrist Who Tried To Prove Reincarnation
How a religion explains death — and life after death — is often as important to an understanding of that faith as is its explanation of God or mortality.
The question of how to escape death is at the center of nearly all religions.
And one of the oldest ideas about how to beat mortality — nearly as old as religion itself — is the idea of reincarnation.
Historians don’t have a concrete understanding of when humans started to believe in rebirth. The faith systems that became modern Hinduism and Buddhism were both orally passed down for centuries before anything was written down. The first known written appearances of the concept are found in the Hindu Upanishads, which are nearly 3,000 years old.
Today the belief is still mainstream in among Hindus, Buddhists and Jains. Perhaps expectedly, it is not at all mainstream among scientists. In fact, roughly half of them believe in a higher power and this — combined with the dominant view that consciousness doesn’t function outside of the brain — makes scientists very unlikely allies of any kind of afterlife beliefs.
But, defying all the odds, the man who has done arguably the most convincing work in proving the scientific viability of rebirth was a white American psychiatrist who died as recently as 2007. That man’s name was Dr. Ian Stevenson and he dedicated his life to the question of whether the scientific method could be used to explain what happens when we die.
This week on the podcast I spoke with Jesse Bering, the author of a new book, “The Incredible Afterlives of Dr. Ian Stevenson” about the psychiatrist’s life and what he believed.
Listen to this episode of the Religion Unplugged podcast on Apple, Spotify or YouTube.
Matthew Peterson is Religion Unplugged’s podcast editor and audience development coordinator. He took part in the 2025 European Journalism Institute held in Prague, an annual program co-sponsored by The Media Project.