Now those of you who read a lot of blogs or are into your science at all probably won’t need to be told all over again that Astrology, Numerology, tarot cards, psychics and all sorts of superstitious nonsense has no basis in reality, but there are way too many people out there who believe all of this crap, so I thought I’d have a bit of a rant about it. It does get blogged about and debunked quite a lot, so my apologies if you were hoping for some new insight and don’t get any here. This is a bit of a long one too, with some videos – so settle in!
If you type ‘astrology’ into google you get about 26,000,000 results. ‘Tarot’ produces another 15,000,000. Feng Shui gets 13,000,000 – and so it goes. There are hundreds of millions of results for utter crap of this nature - a terrific glut of useless misinformation proliferated almost endlessly across the web. I’m going to focus on astrology here because it really is a bit of a drain on society (I’ll explain later) - there are quacks and con artists at every turn making a buck out of this babble. You can read profoundly inaccurate statements about your day, week, life and personality in most widespread periodical publications, and an unthinkably large sector of both Western and Eastern societies place a completely unwarranted amount of importance in the position of the stars at your particular time of birth.
There are actually lots of different kinds of astrology. It is a little bit like religion in that sense: if you take into account the litany of conflicting information, it is easy to figure out that there cannot possibly be any truth to it. After all, there is no logical reason to choose one type of nonsense over another. People just hang on to what they thought was true when they were younger.
The Skeptic’s Dictionary define astrology simply:
“Astrology, in its traditional form, is a type of divination based on the theory that the positions and movements of celestial bodies (stars, planets [except the one you are born on or those in other solar systems], Sun, and Moon) at the time of birth profoundly influence a person's life”
Essentially that there is a magic force from the endless eternity of space that significantly affects every facet of our lives here on planet Earth. That might seem a bit over simplified for those of you who believe this stuff, but the facts are undeniable – unlike the crap spouted by astrologers. I will touch on a few areas that I see are the most obvious, but the evidence against the claims that proponents of astrology make is really endless. They fail every single test, even the ones they design themselves, and produce no more concrete results than you could expect by random chance. Funny that, isn’t it?
Fact: Statements made by astrologers or psychics are bogus- even when they’re right.
If you’re vague enough and say the same things often enough, of course there will be some people for whom that ‘prediction’ rings true. Here’s a link to a video from Derren Brown, one of my favourite astrology sceptics:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=haP7Ys9ocTk
Cannot embed sorry. It is really worth the watch though, if you have the 8 minutes to spare. He demonstrates essentially that most people both see, and want to see the many of the same characteristics in ourselves; and we are more than willing to ignore the blatantly obvious errors in favour of the random chance statements that apply to us. This applies to all superstition and pseudo-science like psychics, numerology and tarot cards etc, although many psychics rely on other trickery (such as cold reading ) to con you out of your money.
The glaring, fundamental error in the zodiac/horoscope.
If you were born at any time in the last 100 years, and those chances are pretty good, you were born around 2000 years after the zodiac was first invented. In case you weren’t aware of the way the Earth is situated and exists through time, its axis and some other small factors constantly alter our position in relationship to the night sky. It is a slow process - especially when compared with the blip of existence that is the individual human life. It happens to have thrown us ahead about 1 place in the zodiac calendar. Here is a very simple explanation by a children’s TV presenter in America. Bill Nye – The Science guy. This one’s a short one so have a peek.
Here’s another video (about 9min) from everyone’s favourite atheist – Richard Dawkins. It’s an overreaching video about all the perils of astrology, but has references (obviously) to the stuff I’m talking about all through it:
Some science
I read a pretty great and accessible space/science blog called Bad Astronomy that often discusses issues of pseudo-science, myths and misconceptions. I’m going to be lazy and quote a decent chunk here (have edited to make it shorter), because he’ll put it better than me, but if you want to read the whole article (more scientifically based obviously) you can read it here.
“There have been studies, tests, experiments, all sorts of things to check this claim. The bottom line is, their claims are wrong. How do I know? Because of a thoroughly researched, well-documented, and referenced paper, which shows precisely where astrology fails all its tests. This paper is titled Is Astrology Relevant to Consciousness and Psi?", and was written by Geoffrey Dean, a long-time astrology researcher, and Ivan Kelly, a professor of Educational Psychology and Special Education at the University of Saskatchewan. As they say in their own paper abstract:
Many tests of astrologers have been made since the 1950s but only recently has a coherent review been possible. A large-scale test of persons born less than five minutes apart found no hint of the similarities predicted by astrology. Meta-analysis of more than forty controlled studies suggests that astrologers are unable to perform significantly better than chance even on the more basic tasks such as predicting extraversion [sociability]. More specifically, astrologers who claim to use psychic ability perform no better than those who do not.”
In other words, astrology doesn't work. They detail the cases of people born at very close times and locations, what they call "time twins" (say, two babies born within minutes of each other at the same hospital). Astrologers, of course, would predict many similarities between time twins. But, as Dean and Kelly phrase it so succinctly, "The strong similarities predicted by astrology were simply not there".
This paper goes on with a very careful analysis of the studies, and also very carefully tries to discuss any flaws astrologers might bring up (for example, they use an astrologer's own definition of what a time twin would be). Simply put, the paper is devastating to astrology. It's also not terribly hard to read. Give it a try! I laughed out loud many times when reading it, it was so matter-of-fact in its dissection and eventual destruction of astrology.
Why should you care?
As Phil Plait (Mr Bad Astronomy) puts it: “. Uncritical thinking is tearing this world to pieces”
You may believe that somehow the location of a star a million light years away from Earth has some bearing on your short time here. You may think it’s just a bit of fun to read your horoscope. You might believe that some psychic can tell you when you’re going to get married, or you may even believe that a random shuffling of cards has some effect on when you’re going to die. The bottom line is that none of these things have any basis in reality, and none of them have repeatable, testable conclusions. All cultural superstitions are plagued with generalisations that prey on the naivety of the masses. Believing any of this crap is genuinely hindering our progress as a society, and it is costing us all money – directly or otherwise.
People actually believe that astrology is somehow related to the important sciences of astronomy and cosmology. If you don’t know the difference, the distinction should be obvious – astrology is a system of cultural myths created by less intelligent civilisations as an attempt to explain the world around them. The myths are no different to the religious ones. They are inconsistent and utterly implausible. Astrology and the zodiac principles ignore genuine science, and do nothing to describe the true majesty of the universe we exist in.
The sooner we eradicate myth and superstition of this nature from our psyche and replace with genuine education - the better off we’ll all be. We need to stop believing people who tell us they have all the answers – because the more questions you ask, the smarter you will become.
This blog barely scratches the surface of just how fraudulent and blatantly false the world of astrology and other pseudo-science is. Below is just a little bit more info, but I encourage everyone to do as much reading and research as possible when it comes to anything remotely questionable!!
Additional reading and watching:
http://skepdic.com/astrolgy.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_astrology
http://www.astrosociety.org/education/astro/act3/astrology3.html
Derren Brown on cold reading: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btP_vy5cQq4
AC Grayling on myth: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6oOLJ_zbm0
Michael Shermer on strange beliefs: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8T_jwq9ph8k
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