I agree with Simon. We need to closely re-examine the terminology
The term “woo” needs to be retired along with “supernatural”, “paranormal” and “parapsychological”.
We should then start by distinguishing between hypernatural and praeternatural and rule out the former because it is physically impossible. Conspiracy theories have nothing to do with causality so should be dealt with separately. But this leaves a very large category of alleged phenomena which fall in to the category of praeternatural (probabilistic supernatural).
That category must be left radically open. Psychegenesis and free will are special cases, but synchronicity and everything else all fall into the same broad category. It includes some sorts of beliefs which are inherently damaging. An example is believing in a God which forbids contraception – here the problem isn’t belief a non-physical being per se, but the content of the allegedly revealed law. This area is important because it includes all of the most harmful forms of existing religions, especially the fundamentalist Abrahamic varieties. What I am saying is this shouldn’t just be rejected wholesale because it is woo. Instead we need to say that people can believe whatever they like, provided they aren’t expecting anybody else to believe it, and provided it is not harmful to anybody else.
As far as any sort of ideological system goes – any sort of structure or foundation for shared worldviews – then the position has to be that we simply don’t know, that science can’t go there, and that there are never going to be objective answers to these questions. We need to learn to just accept that some people claim to experience these things, others have faith they are real even though they’ve not experienced them themselves, and others are skeptical. There’s no point in the skeptics trying to enforce their skepticism on society in general and no point in the believers trying to get everybody to believe.
Praeternatural phenomena aren’t always what they appear to be. It is entirely possible for somebody to know with absolute certainty they’ve experienced something of this sort, but not know what the real cause was, although they may insist that they do know the cause.
For example, they may experience being in contact with some sort of conscious intelligence. This will involve their mind being read (including direct questions) and very clear answers being provided (and I mean answers written in English). Let’s say these answers seem to be messages from God. That person can now know that praeternatural phenomena are real, but how can they know what caused them? Was it really God? Or was it another human? Or maybe a spiritually advanced alien? Or the result of some sort of praeternatural law we currently have no means of understanding?
There is no point in trying to reach a left hemisphere conclusion about these things. The left hemisphere cannot process it. It will never be able to reach any sort of conclusion that is worth anything. The existence of most kinds of phenomena that fall into this category must therefore remain an open question, so that each person can explore this territory on their own terms. This is the only way genuine spirituality can work. If you try to do it collectively then the result is a new religion, and I don’t think that is where this should be going.
It must not be ruled out by bad (materialistic) metaphysics, or bad (scientistic) epistemology, but neither can it be ruled in at the level of society in general or in terms of any ideological system we are expecting people to accept.