Mario Nistri:
More in general, I think it has to be admitted that there is something about theese things that happens and that is not easily explained by our actual scientific knowledge.
However, since there are measurable effects, I think it's reasonable to assume that the causes has to be measurable as well to some degree.
I definitely agree - but my main thesis is that we could push the boundaries of 'what we don't know' back with some serious study. However, I'm not positive that we will ever be able to fully put everything neatly into "science".
And I don't think that is necessary or desired. There is a great book called "The Blood of the Earth: an essay on magic and peak oil" by John Michael Greer that really delves into this point.
"Philosophers and psychologists down the centuries have tried to bring our attention to two important but generally neglected facts: we know more than we realize and we affect more than we realize. Look at the human organism from an evolutionary standpoint and this isn't hard to understand. Our rational, conscious, symbol-using minds are recent and rather rickety structures built by evolution over top of a superbly adapted mammalian nervous system.
I could list any number of other examples, but I trust my readers will have gotten the point: a great deal of what goes on in our lives depends not on our rational, linguistic, symbol-using minds, but on an intricate and richly communicative nonrational substructure inherited from our animal ancestors, most of which we never notice and much of which is highly resistant to any kind of conscious control. The main current of our industrial culture, which has made the rational mind central to its core cultural project and fixates on a particular mode of conscious control, has few resources to offer for dealing with that substructure, other than ignoring it, white-knuckling it, or drugging it into temporary submission. There are better tools t hand, though: the tools of magic."
The point of not throwing out science unless required is whether there is utility in the enterprise. I think there are some compelling aspects to using what we presently know as explanations for mechanisms since they offer some framework to make sense of areas that otherwise are basically completely non-rational.
In the case of the breast lump healing there is a more magical hypothesis: the master used two aspects of qi latent abilities. The first is the way that far larger sources of energy, available locally, may be tapped and channeled to perform a task. We had meditated many times in the room where the healing was performed and every time such activity is performed in the same place then the surrounding is 'structured' to facilitate both storage and retrieval of qi.
The second was using the energies of the group. Depending upon the connection (emotional as well as on an energetic level) it is possible to chain together a group and then channel their energies. In the case of the breast lump I could clearly feel this effect when he performed the healing. I have also used this for some of my own work.
Both of these are possible within the boundaries of science. I also think both explanations also lead to interesting lines of inquiry.