Back to the Future, Reincarnation and Sperm

Some movies are exciting to watch. But if you take the plot seriously, you may find that it is not possible to be true. For example, the invisible man, if he exists, would be blind, since he cannot have an opaque cornea which allows sight.

Another exciting movie plot is time travelling. In the movie "Back to the Future", 17 year old Marty McFly, who has a nerdy dad, alcoholic mum, an elder brother and an elder sister, accidentally warps himself from 1985 to 1955, where he meets both of his parents when they are teenagers. Marty unintentionally interrupts his parent's first meeting together. Our hero must now reunite his parents-to-be, lest he cease to exist in the 1980s. Being a good sci-fi movie, everything ended well. After some adventures, he re-unites his parents and return back to 1985. He finds that his dad is now a famous author and his mom was sober. He still has his brother and sister, except they are leading better lives.

Nice story, except it cannot be real, even when time travel is possible. Even though Marty re-unites his parents, there can be no guarantee that his siblings and him will be born. First, he cannot ensure that his father (who is now an author) and mother (who is now sober), will have sex exactly at the same time as they had before the time travelling occurs in order to produce Marty and his siblings. Even if Marty can ensure that they have sex exactly at the same time for that three occasions, he cannot ensure that the same spermatozoon will fertilize his mother's egg. If it is a different spermatozoon, it will be a different person, even with a different sex. Marty may well be born as Martina. Even the egg produced may not be the same.

Reincarnation is like these movies. As long as you treat it like a nice fiction, it is okay. But when you think of how it can be implemented in the real world, you have to grapple with the problem of the 2 cause-and-effects, the normal scientific cause-and-effect and the Karmic cause-and-effect. Of course you can argue that we do not understand everything, which is why we need faith. But faith that is not based on facts is very dangerous. When the foundation cannot be proven true, then anything incredible can be built on it. Thus in Chinese Buddhism, you have 6 realms (六道: 天．人．阿修羅．畜生．餓鬼．地獄) to be reincarnated. Is it true? Nobody knows. I can also come up with my own theory of reincarnation. This is the reason why although the Chinese are very smart people, but Science comes from the West, where the religion stress on Truth.