Paranormal

    We all should be reasonably open-minded skeptics and for psychic phenomena indicative of life after death, only accept the theory that there is survival of consciousness after physical death when theories along normal lines and/or ESP (psi) fail to account for all of the evidence.
∙ There is no doubt that in a relatively short period of time, science has made great strides in understanding the physical world.  Because of this, many people believe that if  presently there is not a scientific explanation for something, it is not a question of if it will be explained by science but a matter of when.  Applying this to the various paranormal phenomena, these people believe science will either have a complete explanation in the future or it is just a deception of some sort.  Generally speaking, there is strong evidence for some of the psychic phenomena but not to the point where it can be accepted as fact.
The extreme skeptics of the paranormal have a tendency to refute the least credible of paranormal examples; they seldom try to take on the best evidence and if they do they do not give very credible alternative explanations.  To do the former, is easy, the latter, generally quite difficult.  They also unfairly (and unscientifically I might add) tend to group all of the paranormal together and reject it all.  Its not all or nothing and the same applies to the various evidence types for life after death.  For instance, mediums communicating with the dead could be true but this has no relation with astrology being true or not - the two are independent of one another but this gets lost on some of the extreme skeptics in their overall outlook.
In fact, with the paranormal as it relates to life after death, there clearly are many cases of both deliberate deception (as we would expect due to the nature of the subject) and where there are alternative explanations.  But these are not the cases we need to be scrutinizing to determine if they constitute evidence for life after death - although this is unfortunately what some skeptics do to present their conclusions against the paranormal.  The cases that have no other plausible conventional explanation are the ones that need to be held to the test.
We also have to be careful with paranormal phenomena in that, even if the particular phenomena or, more commonly the case, elements of it can be induced, it does not necessarily mean or follow that this is the cause of the paranormal phenomena and the explanation for it.  A non-paranormal analogy being, for example, certain drugs can induce euphoria in a person but when one normally is experiencing euphoria, it is real and occurs naturally without the effect of any drugs.  Therefore, drug intake is not the explanation for euphoria normally experienced even though drugs can induce it.
It should be noted that the various aspects to the best paranormal phenomena cases have thus far been very difficult to account for collectively using natural scientific models