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Notes -
And to the extent that this was true but not longer is, past Christians may have taken as a sign that Christianity was correct: as I've mentioned on here before, early Christian apologists made use of the decline in paranormal phenomena as evidence that Christ's coming at upended the old order of things.
But I'm not so sure things are that different from 1st century Judea. In Christ's time, generals consulted the entrails of animals; roughly two thousand years later, the generals consulted psychics. Divination and astrology remain popular, rogue billionaires fund research into the question of life after death, insiders from shadowy oracular government agencies tell Congress that UFOs could be coming from other dimensions, the New York Times runs articles about demon exorcism. I could see future generations looking back on 21st century America as a heyday of superstition and belief in the paranormal.
It might be true that OP's statement "claims that may have seemed more plausible centuries ago but are no longer so persuasive" is true in the literal sense that, as you say, the "cultural milieu" may be more skeptical of them now. But I'm not sure the cultural milieu is the best way of evaluating the truth of a claim. And even if it was, it seems fairly constant to me that the majority of people believe in the paranormal or spiritual, while a minority of people (often well-educated) express skepticism of it, with varying levels of outspokenness.
I've got a note on the context above you may have missed. That being said – two of my favorite passages of Scripture (and quite topical to Christmas, for they roughly bookend the Gospel accounts of Christ's life) touch on this question:
The above is from Matthew 2. Below, from John 18 - 19:
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