If science explains everything so perfectly, why is there an increasing belief in paranormal things?
It takes time for people to lose their 'woo'.
Firstly, please don't ever cite how many people believe something to be true as a measure of it being true. You cannot prove anything by general consensus. You could say 100 billion people believe in something for which there is no objective measure and their assertion would be defeated by a single person who simply pointed out that fact.
Just because you employ positive reinforcement, confirmation bias and cherry-picking among a group of like-minded 'believers' does not make for evidence. The plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data'. Nothing 'paranormal' has EVER been demonstrated that could survive critical analysis and you want to simply say, "Well, shucks, there's a lot of us who believe in it so we'll ignore the absolute lack of any data to support our claims" because that's sensible, right?
Secondly, people will often move from theism to agnosticism because they understand that religion is a man-made phenomenon, but they will still cite their own experiences of, "things wot u cud nt expln!!!!!1!1", leading them into maintaining a belief in 'the supernatural' allowing them to still hold on to the notion of 'dualism', something a lot of people believe they need to do because of their conditioning from religion.
Trouble is, if we can explain away every single claim towards the 'paranormal', which we can, and those who cite having 'knowledge of' the 'paranormal' are completely unable to ever demonstrate objective proof of such, then I think we're safe to say that our non-woo explanations are, as for 'god', infinitely more likely to be correct.
A few comments I'd like to make about this post:
1) "Woo" is certainly abundant. Woo exists most prominently when someone looks at some evidence or experiment and makes unwarranted assumptions about it, e.g. how Deepak Chopra might look at ideas of quantum non-locality and use it alone to make statements about all of us being 'one,' or something to that effect.
Woo does not exist where there is a valid or sound logical argument that either provides a basis for bypassing scientific explanation altogether, or for framing scientific explanation within a broader, valid philosophical context.
2) Agreed,
ad populum proves nothing. Just make sure you recognize this also applies to the countless persons who believe Empiricism is the end-all to knowledge acquisition. There are both things which provably exist outside the scope of empirical explanation, and methods of knowledge acquisition which provably trump Empiricism in terms of general explanation (e.g. how Philosophy can explain and validate empirical exploration whereas Empiricism cannot, etc.).
To this end, scientific "woo" also exists, and usually takes the form of, "Look how far science has taken us technologically and in terms of our understanding of specific natural processes, therefore science is the best method of exploration."
3) Also keep in mind there is no empirical evidence that validates the scientific method. Science as a working method is validated entirely by Philosophy.
4) Automatically equating things like God or Intelligent Design to "paranormal" is a form of intellectual dishonesty (for, if such things exist, they are not paranormal but real). What we
can do is equate "paranormal" with "unreal," thereby elucidating my point -- one who assumes that God or I.D. must be paranormal is intellectually dishonest in that he
a priori dismisses these things as unreal without any rational basis to make such an analogy.