Our beliefs about the world tend to evolve, as in a single human life and societies as a whole. When you're a kid you believe in the tooth fairy, in Santa Claus and perhaps that there is a boogeyman under your bed or in the closet. Once you mature you find that there are no such things, and the continuous lack of experience from these entitites seem to suggest it as well. You also learn that your fellow human beings believed in these things when they were young too, but as they mature they neither see any of these things and can give rational explanations for what was previously attributed to them. Rational explanations are sought, perhaps it was your mother who placed the money under your pillow? Your dad, or grandpa or someone else playing Santa Claus? The weird creepy sounds you heard at night were perhaps just your cat, or the wind, or something else perfectly natural and not attributed to the boogeyman at all?

The analogy of the child learning a decent amount of critical thinking can be applied to humanity as a large. Certainly leprechauns and fairies have disappeared because of our change in lifestyle, but does this mean that these things are real? Early man were not stupid per se, they just didn't have any other explanations for what was happening in the world around them. Thus they created myths to explain creation, to explain thunder, the wind, the sun and all other natural forces that they perceived. Everywhere in the world cultures have created their own myths to come to terms with the world around them, and they represent a great variety of environments and forms of society. They also share many things in common, which is not very weird because we are all humans after all, built pretty much the same in terms of physiology and the way our brain works and perceives. All of these myths were also the sole truth within every culture, and they were not to be questioned.

None of this changed very much until about the 6th century BC, when a wave of tolerance emerged amongst intellectuals. For the first time philosophers and intellectuals could throw away these simple myths about our world and develop their own theories. At first, naturally these ideas were not very correct, but the important thing was that humans tried to really explain the world without resorting to God and the supernatural. The development continued, and the theories produced got better and better and we found that mathematics also were a reliable tool to describe and predict the world.

Out of this grew the first inklings of the scientific method, where we actually were genuinelly commited to the effort of verifying that our statements about the world were true (or at least not shown to be false). The better our observations got, the better theories we had, the more consistencies and consensus we could establish, the less were supernatural explanations needed to explain the world. Soon thunder wasn't because of Gods, but because of natural forces. Soon earth wasn't created a few thousands years in the past, but several billion years ago. Soon natural catastrophies were not because of angry spirits and/or Gods, but because of natural movements and processes in the climate of the earth. Soon disease wasn't caused by demons, but because of tiny little microorganisms and/or malfunctioning biological systems. Soon life wasn't created just as it is by God, but it had developed through the slow natural processes of evolution. The list goes on. 

All the ideas, all the hypothesis, were falsifiable. They were vulnerable to objective observation and verification and/or falsification, whereas the old myths and religious faiths often were just that; propositions of faith, that were not falsifiable. If they were formulated in such a way that they were, in fact, falsifiable - they were shown to be false propositions. They had to get out of the way for far greater and beautiful explanations that were consistent with objective observations. This is real honesty and intellectual integrity in the search of knowledge. This is the state of our knowledge today, and it has given us a remarkable understanding of our universe and given us remarkable technology that could barely be dreamt about in the past. This is the methods that have landed rovers on Mars and humans on the moon, given us medicines to cure things that killed millions in the past, given us all we know about nutrition, given us the ability to sit here on our computers and communicate through invisible electromagnetic fields over large distances. The list goes on and on.

Now, I ask, what has religion, superstitious faith and supernatural explanations given us? Nothing. They have only gimped real understanding and knowledge, and have contributed nothing. In fact, superstitious faith have been a great contributer to mans inhumanity to man, all the while reason and rational discourse have given us a fast growing understanding of our universe and our place within it, human rights, secular politics, medicine, acknowledgement of women and homosexuality, among a great number of other things.

So to wrap it up; just because people believed silly things in the past doesn't make it true - in fact, there is everything to suggest that it was wrong. And if there is something we should wish to do, it would be to get rid of silly explanations and seek the real ones about the happenings of our world and our place within it. The more we do this, the more incredible the universe around us becomes - this, my friend, is true spirituality in the scientific sense

Oh, and this is also the way we should go about to investigate Qi phenomena if we wanna really learn about its falsehood or its lack of thereof. Anyway, this post was a bit off-topic, but I get carried along.