Two pronged attack

[MRT]

I was taken to task recently by someone for not being scientific enough. Fair enough, I could have taken this from a scientist but this person wanted me to consider 'paranormal possibilities' as well. Either he's hedging his bets, backing both science and the paranormal or he thinks science just hasn't caught up with his superior understanding of the universe yet. I was fascinated by this twin pronged attack; not scientific enough nor paranormal enough.

Unfortunately, it's not novel. My recent experience in paranormal research is that everyone wants to appear scientific, no matter what they believe (in). Ask them a simple question and its obvious they were too busy txting during the science classes! Everyone is very keen on 'energy', 'frequencies', 'quantum mechanics' and so on. I'm impressed that they're all so well up on QM. Wasn't it Richard Feynman who said that, if you think you understand QM then you don't really understand it? I guess he never asked a psychic!

[Cuddles]

That's actually a surprisingly common approach. The logic basically seems to be that you can't possibly be being scientific because you haven't come to the same conclusion as them. As you say, the people who say this usually have absolutely no idea what science actually is, let alone understand the details of any particular branch.

[median]

Unfortunately, it's not novel. My recent experience in paranormal research is that everyone wants to appear scientific, no matter what they believe (in).

Science claims a certain kudos. However, ambivalence is plainly obvious.
Most are quite happy to spout off how 'close minded' science is but at the same time fail to see the progress that science has actually made in our understanding of the world.
It seems that the paranormal is an area in which 'normal rules' suddenly don't seem to apply.