Although debunkers of the paranormal fancy themselves as rational and scientific, their fixed notions of materialism, evolution, and atheism are the exact opposite.
 
Not only are those beliefs not proven by reason or science, science isn't a noun, a dogma to defend. It's a process, a verb. Rather than just affirming beliefs by seeking only friendly faces in an infinite universe of facts, true science, and basic honesty for that matter, is about making every effort to disprove the ideas and beliefs we hold dear.
 
Unfortunately, debunkers, like most people, don't do that. Instead, people identify with a fixed dogma, e.g., "I am an evolutionist, materialist, atheist, agnostic, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist . . ." or whatever. That's a sure way to fix the brain in place, insulating it from the unfolding of advancing knowledge that brings us closer to the truth.
 
With regard to paranormal and preternatural phenomena, reason, experience, and science (quantum physics in particular) permit their possibility. They should not be cast aside as "woo woo" out of hand. They are a gateway to exploration and enlightenment. 

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It's Impossible and Ridiculous
 
In the early 1900s when Wilbur and Orville Wright flew their plane, Scientific American dismissed the event as a hoax. Simon Newcomb, a professor of mathematics and astronomy at Johns Hopkins University showed scientifically that powered human flight was "utterly impossible." For five years people looked up at the plane flying overhead, but there was a general denial that it ever left the ground.
 
Even after Edison lit up Menlo Park around his laboratory with incandescent lights, scientists protested that Edison had "a positive want of knowledge of the electric circuit" and that the whole thing was "a completely idiotic idea." He was called the sorcerer of Menlo Park and told that what he was attempting would never be technically feasible.
 
When Charles Parsons invented the turbine and claimed it would greatly increase the speed of ships, the Admiralty told him that such a feat was impossible. The turbojet was also labeled "an impossibility."
 
When Baird developed a television, those who observed it were convinced "it was all a trick or something equally disreputable." Even the discoverer of radio waves, Heinrich Hertz, warned Guglielmo Marconi that he was "wasting his time" with experiments on wireless broadcasting.
 
When Wilhelm Roentgen announced his discovery of x-rays, Lord Kelvin—author of almost 700 scientific papers, 70 inventions, creator of the absolute zero Kelvin temperature scale, and perhaps the greatest physicist of the 1800s—remarked that x-rays were nothing but an "elaborate hoax."
 
Immanuel Velikovsky's ideas (1950) about the violent history of Earth contradicted the vogue slow and steady uniformitarian view of Earth history that fit the evolution hypothesis. His various predictions, such as the high temperature of Venus and the projected magnetic field of the Earth, were called by scientists "intellectually fraudulent," "dynamically impossible," and "too ridiculous to merit serious rebuttal." Macmillan, the publisher of his book, Worlds in Collision, was forced to stop printing it due to pressure from their academic textbook buyers even though Velikovsky's book was their biggest moneymaker.

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The noted British astronomer, Sir Harold Spencer Jones, pronounced that "space travel is bunk" two weeks before Sputnik 1 was launched into orbit.
 
This only begins the shameful and dispiriting catalog of intolerance by supposedly rational and dispassionate scientists and their vassals. Advance seems to only ever occur by struggling against a tide of opposition, not because of cool, principled devotion to reason and science.
 
Debunkers
 
Since protecting the status quo is the status quo, it's little wonder that the paranormal and metaphysical have not been embraced by materialists and evolutionists, and even many religionists.
 
The primary journal in the paranormal field is the Journal of Parapsychology. It contains peer-reviewed research that's primarily privately funded and has a readership in the hundreds. On the other hand, The Skeptical Inquirer, a publication of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP), does not conduct research relevant to discovery, but rather is in the business of debunking. It has a circulation of about 25,000. People are much more given to protecting biases than venturing into the realm of new ideas.
 
When trying to prove that there is no correlation between the position of Mars and the birth of gifted athletes (such scientific evidence exists) the debunkers reportedly fudged data. In another instance, to disprove ESP experiments at Duke University where a subject in one building guessed the cards in another, a CSICOP debunker proposed that the subject only pretended not to be in the building where the cards were. The debunker claimed that the subject surreptitiously gained access to the building where the cards were and crawled through the attic to view the cards through a hole in the ceiling. That the blueprints of the building showed such a scenario impossible didn't matter. This proof of ESP fraud remained in CSICOP's publications long after it was proven that the fraud was on CSICOP's part.
 
Consider crop circles. When some circles were traced to hoaxers traipsing on boards held by ropes in their hands, scientists around the world who had been unable to explain the phenomena rationally heaved a great sigh of relief. Die-hard believers then appeared genuinely foolish. But as the phenomenon has continued around the world and has been traced to dates before the identified hoaxers, it's again reemerging as a genuine mystery. But the thought police will forever cite the hoaxes as a reason for carte blanche dismissal regardless of what evidence comes forward.

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On the other hand, materialists and religionists critical of the paranormal would never even consider dismissing their beliefs regardless of how many frauds have been found in their camps, how dangerous their doctrines may be, or why their ideas have not created a utopia.
 
Any failures, frauds, or adverse consequences that result from consensus beliefs are merely taken to mean more research money is needed to winnow the truth from the corruption. So long as the sacrosanct creeds are kept hallowed, no amount of adverse or contrary data and evidence matters.
In the meantime, any supplemental view of reality, such as metaphysics and consciousness surviving death, or evidence in support of it such as paranormal events, is summarily dismissed if there can be found the slightest hint of fraud.
 
Professional Witch-Hunting
 
It's supposed to be the very nature of science to look for and embrace the exception, the extraordinary, the weird. Mere vexation is not a reason to reject an idea.
 
Nevertheless, from the ranks of materialistic apologists claiming to be scientific come contract debunkers such as CSICOP, the "Amazing Randi," and the Penn and Teller television program called "Bull Shit." Thought policing literature and internet sites abound to protect us from the encroachment of those who would dare to tread on materialistic hallowed ground. Their advertised purpose is to protect the public from charlatans who would fleece people of their hard-earned cash.
 
Certainly, there's no reason for tolerance of fraud. But if Mrs. Jones spent 25 dollars for a séance where a thumping and jumping table had been rigged with invisible wires operated by a huckster who moaned like a ghost from behind a curtain, does that merit the hysteria and call to arms we see from the ranks of the debunkers? Belief in ESP, metal bending, intelligent design, and psychic abilities doesn't threaten civilization. On the other hand, the materialistic dogma at the helm of today's science, religion, and politics threatens the very existence of life on the planet.
 
A similar situation is the clash between conventional materialistic medicine and holistic alternative medicine. The medical profession en masse, the FDA, licensing boards, journals, research institutions, and the media are quick to point to any evidence that alternative medical care may not work or is harmful. Heaven forbid there's a report of somebody somewhere getting sick from taking vitamins (usually synthetic versions, if there is ever an incident) or an herb at 100 times the dose for an elephant. When that happens, everybody piles on and the alternative movement is cast as a scam to part people from their money. At the same time, right under our noses, trillions of dollars per year are spent on conventional allopathic materialistic medical care that is killing more people than any other single cause. There isn't a peep of protest from the mainstream.
 
It's supposed to be the very nature of science to look for and embrace the exception, the extraordinary, the weird. Mere vexation is not a reason to reject an idea.
 
Miracles Are Normal
 
Debunkers reject the metaphysical claiming they take no stock in miracles. Yet they do.
 
For example, life itself is a miracle and inexplicable. An egg the size of the period at the end of this sentence developing into a self-aware human with a body that becomes alive and marshals trillions of synchronized speed-of-light biochemical events every second is miraculous. It's a miracle that we safely travel at a million-and-a-half miles per hour on the Earth spaceship. The natural laws of gravity, motion, electricity, thermodynamics, and so on that make each moment possible are inexplicable and miraculous.
 
Our entire world of existence is miraculous since it cannot be explained, accounted for, or duplicated.
 
An immortal soul, a spirit realm, and a Creator are just as believable as earthly life and the miracles that make it possible.
 
It's science and reason, not malarkey, that leads to the conclusion that reality is timeless, holistic, conscious, and intelligent. This, not materialism, easily accommodates all the "quirky" and "lunatic" weird phenomena. It's all perfectly plausible as long as one doesn't get hoodwinked by the simplistic faith that puny human senses and touchy-feely matter define the universe.