What I didn’t want to include in my book

The God Conclusion was written by a Christian (me) and intended to be read by people interested in the scientific evidence for a Creator, and the logical argument for belief in a supernatural God. In the book I defend the Bible against a determined attack by Richard Dawkins from his book The God Delusion, but when I attack atheism, I rely almost exclusively on logic and scientific evidence to make my case. I spent more than a decade of my life researching the book before writing it. Thousands of hours were spent watching lectures and videos that didn’t even earn a mention.

I had no idea how difficult it would become to determine what information should be excluded from the book. What do you do when you find information that you consider to be coming from a credible source that conflicts with your existing worldview? I am a Christian, and not the least bit shy about saying so.

However, my book argues for belief in “God” (not specifically Yahweh) even though I believe that Yahweh is God. What does that mean? The ultimate goal of my book is to convince nonbelievers and those with very serious doubts about the existence of God the scientific evidence actually shows that a supernatural Creator exists. I make it clear that I personally believe this Creator is the God of the Bible, but I leave it to the reader to figure out God’s true identity for themselves.

While doing my research I discovered some evidence that reincarnation might have possibly occurred. I’m going to be brutally honest, mostly because that’s the only way I know how to be — I really didn’t want to include that material in my book. I wanted every Christian to be able to read my book with comfort in the thought that a fellow Christian wrote the book, so it doesn’t contain what I am tempted to call pagan theology. The struggle was real. Reincarnation isn’t part of our Christian belief system.

In fact, I’ll even quote from a popular website called gotquestions.org, which specifically says, “For the Christian, however, there can be no doubt: reincarnation is unbiblical and must be rejected as false.”

And therein lies my dilemma…Christian teaching and every instinct warns me to avoid this subject completely or handle it with extreme care, but the problem is that I stumbled across the information in the process of doing my research. The information clearly seems to be rather well supported by scientific evidence, unless we develop a sophisticated conspiracy theory to refute it. Ultimately, I chose to take the approach of “we report, you decide.”

The biggest problem for me is that even though reincarnation is not taught in the Bible, the scientific evidence in this one particular case (five-year-old Ryan Hammons) is frankly astonishing. In my opinion, there are only three possible explanations for the details of his account:

1. The little boy was coached to the point of brainwashing by his parents so they could fool the professional researcher.
2. The researchers, family, and all involved were actors making a scripted show, not a real documentary.
3. The story is true, even though it is also somewhat unbelievable.

This is where the idea of reincarnation becomes even more problematic for me, because the evidence seems to be giving me an excuse to believe it is true. Part of me sees the value of reincarnation simply due to the sheer number of babies aborted in the last fifty years and never got a chance to live. Part of me thinks about all the innocent victims of the Holocaust, and the Holomodor. What about innocent children murdered as collateral damage due to war? Don’t they deserve a chance for a normal life on Earth. However, wishful thinking doesn’t make reincarnation evidence true or false. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and the evidence I had seen was truly extraordinary. I wrote an email to Dr. Jim Tucker, the lead researcher in the Ryan Hammons case, and learned he is also a Christian. Dr. Tucker agreed that reincarnation wasn’t part of Christian theology and conceded that he’d never had another case that approached the degree of information that Ryan Hammons had about his alleged former life. In doing so, I confirmed Dr. Tucker was a real person, thus ruling out option #2.

The little boy’s claims had been very detailed and specific: in his former life, he’d allegedly been an agent named Marty Martins who was involved in the entertainment business in Hollywood. The life of Marty Martins had been just public enough that it could be investigated. So Tucker and his team investigated. Photo lineups of people the child claimed to know in his previous life were mixed in with similar photos and shown to the boy, and Ryan’s “guess” success rate was well over ninety percent correct. Somehow, for some strange reason, he knew detailed and specific information from this relatively obscure Hollywood agent’s life that a five-year-old boy from Oklahoma simply shouldn’t know.

Nobody should.

Could Ryan have been coached by his parents as part of a planned hoax? Sure, I guess anything is possible. But what would be their motive? I could see doing it for a book and movie deal, but just to fool some researchers from the University of Virginia? It doesn’t make any sense. Their explanation does make sense — they wanted their little boy to stop talking about a past life as a Hollywood agent and start acting like a normal kid again. If that’s true, the investigation worked. Tucker tracked down the living daughter of the Hollywood agent, now an old woman, and introduced her to the boy. Apparently seeing the man’s daughter as an old woman shocked Ryan so much that the connection or spell or whatever it was between him and Marty Martins broke, and he stopped talking about his past life, almost as if he’d been possessed by the spirit of Marty Martins and seeing the daughter performed an impromptu exorcism of sorts.

Sorry, but I don’t have a better explanation for the good information produced by the research of Dr. Jim Tucker. Can humans be possessed by the spirits of other humans, or was the entity in Ryan Hammons a demon posing as a human? I don’t know. All I do know is the information was out there, and I knew about it. By refusing to mention it, I would be choosing to censor from the reader information gleaned from my research. That would be dishonest.

Some people claim that reincarnation was removed from the Bible, but that also seems to be wishful thinking. On the one hand, reincarnation would solve everybody’s problems. People who die prematurely might get a second chance. On the other hand, Satan is the KING of liars, and this could be one of his most convincing lies. But then I’d have to question his motive…

Sigh. I know for a fact that people don’t need to believe in reincarnation in order to be saved. That’s the ultimate goal, saving people from eternal suffering. People who have read and liked The God Delusion have been convinced that the evidence doesn’t support belief in a supernatural God. Those people are part of my target audience. I have evidence–lots of evidence that supernatural phenomena is real in The God Conclusion.

Ryan Hammons is a case of reincarnation or demonic possession–we report the facts, and you decide. I strongly encourage readers to look at the evidence and evaluate it for themselves. Check the footnotes. Watch the videos. See for yourself.

Then let me know what you think.