I believe parapsychology has proven the existence of the paranormal beyond all reasonable doubt. The question becomes then; who is the official judge if this has happened or not.This is a trap I see in many people claiming validity of paranormal evidence. They frame a claim as a scientific one, and attempt to cite scientific support for their world view, but when it fails to actually live up to the standards of the framing device, they insult the framing device and require ad populum acceptance or neutrality. But no matter how many millions of people and cultures misperceive our sun sheds mostly yellow light, it's still mostly white light (with a tiny bit on the green spectrum). Thus millions/billions of people can still be incorrect.
The links you've presented to me have asserted scientific evidence of their claim, so it's silly to then say expecting the evidence to be as scientific as claimed is 'scientism' (a word I see using almost exclusively as a pejorative in the same way some religious people try and frame atheism as 'a religion' in a game of equivocation.)
I'm not a 'scientism' (which is a weird word because it's got no noun. Someone who is a scientist is not necessarily a follower of scientism) because I don't reduce all relevant fields of study to just science. Because that's what it really is. Evidence: I'm an artist and I also dabble in history and philosophy, none of which are scientific fields yet I still consider valuable to learning and the human experience. Not being a follower of scientism though doesn't mean that I can't have the completely valid expectation that claims about the natural world (which includes the claimed effect ON the natural world by 'something not natural') be empirically accessible, ESPECIALLY if they're being framed as such. And I don't think "parapsychologists" have come anywhere near to achieving that.
Here is one of the better papers arguing the case:
AN ASSESSMENT OF THE EVIDENCE FOR PSYCHIC FUNCTIONING
Excerpt:
Using the standards applied to any other area of science, it is concluded that psychic functioning has been well established. The statistical results of the studies examined are far beyond what is expected by chance. Arguments that these results could be due to methodological flaws in the experiments are soundly refuted. Effects of similar magnitude to those found in government-sponsored research at SRI and SAIC have been replicated at a number of laboratories across the world. Such consistency cannot be readily explained by claims of flaws or fraud.
Then there are the untold number of case investigations and testing done by numerous investigators showing materialistic explanations unsatisfactory .
But even beyond that endless obfuscation of facts, a fair analysis of the million/billion events in the human experience (including my own) has convinced me beyond reasonable doubt that there is more to the universe than can be understood through materialism. I have seen/heard way too many strong cases for me to accept that they all have an in-the-box materialist explanation.
We each must form our own opinion. I can only present an overview of what has convinced me to reject materialism.
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