Can We Call Astrology A Science Yet?
Not long ago, I was firmly in the camp of people who know their star sign because they read it in a horoscope column of a newspaper. That was as far as I would go, and would happily lump Astrology in with psychics, mediums, tarot cards and other esoteric practises that for hippies and crazy people.
I was also someone who was growing increasingly fascinated with personality type tests. Everything from Myers-Briggs to the Big Five Personality Index to Strengths Finder to what Harry Potter house I might belong to.
It was a pleasant time.
Until… I read an article stating the lack of scientific basis the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (my personal favourite inventory) had. It was disturbing to say the least.
When discussing this with a skeptical friend, I was introduced to the concept of the Barnum effect. This is a common psychological phenomenon that describes our tendency to agree strongly with statements about our personality or lifestyle that seem highly specific to us… but are in fact very general and apply to a wide range of people.
After chewing on this for some time, you might think I decided to do away with my love for personality type tests altogether. If they weren’t really describing me so accurately, and my INTJ identity could just as easily be an ISFJ… surely, I should give up my faith in the personality type test?
I mean, if they’re about as useful as reading your horoscope, then… Then…
Then I should ALSO get into Astrology!
Yes, my conclusion was: if I get value in the form of understanding myself and others better from taking a personality test, then why not broaden my self-knowledge with other practices, like Astrology?
At first glance, an inventory like Myers-Briggs is very different to Astrology. With a personality test, the test-taker has subjective input when answering questions. This is unlike Astrology, where we don’t (as far as we know…) choose our birth time and place. Where I spot the similarity is in the moment of recognition.
When you read a statement in a personality test and identify your character in it. Agreeing with the statement ‘I prefer one to one conversations to group discussions’ is, for me, identical to the moment you read and agree with the statement ‘having the Sun in Aries at the moment of your birth means you’re likely to take charge of a situation.’ In either case, the Barnum effect may be at play, but you also get a chance to learn how you see yourself, and that is powerful knowledge.
I started to listen to a podcast, The Astrology Podcast, figuring this would give me an idea about what these star-gazing hippies believe. Soon, I wasn’t just savvy to my sun sign (that’s what you Astrology rookies would call your star sign), I knew my rising sign and where my Moon was. It was all very exciting as I had one ‘that is SO ME!’ moment after another. I had found the holy grail of Barnum statements and I was hooked.
If it works, how does it work?
To clarify, throughout this phase of diving deeper down the rabbit hole of Astrology (and recording a podcast about my exploration) I was at no point convinced that the planets were actually affecting my life, my personality or my behaviours. This is a bit of a controversial idea in the Astrology community. Some believe that the planets have an impact us through electromagnetic rays or some yet-to-be-discovered physical law. They might cite the fact that if the Moon has an effect on the tides, and since we’re like, mostly water, and Jupiter is much bigger than the Moon, then surely the planets can affect our moods, behaviours and whether we end up as carpenters or lawyers or anything else for that matter.
Some explain the workings of Astrology through an effect Carl G. Jung described: synchronicity. This is best understood as an “acausal connecting principle” or a pattern of connection that is not explained by any obvious cause. It happens when we witness two (or more) things happen simultaneously in a way that feels meaningful to us. The difference between a synchronistic event and a coincidence is that synchronicity gives clues of an underlying pattern or interplay that is being expressed through the connected events.
I’d be more inclined to get behind the latter explanation, but I’m equally happy to see Astrology as a natural result of our ability to make connections and find meaning even in random data. For some of you adverse to such paradoxes, I’ll try to explain what value I got from this game of make-believe.
Taking personality tests, just like reading daily horoscopes, serve me and many others in powerful ways regardless of their scientific validity (or lack thereof.)
When we are given a statement like ‘I prefer to arrive on time for appointments’ or ‘You are experiencing a great deal of change right now’, as broad and generic as they may be, we have an opportunity to do some real self-enquiry.
What does the statement about time-keeping trigger in us? A reminder of our resentment for our friend who is always late? Or a reminder that others may view time-keeping differently to us, and we could show some compassion to our tardy friend. They have a different personality to us, that’s all.
With the statement about change, we might realise a possible reason for our general feelings of uneasiness — we likely are going through a lot of change in one life area, and just acknowledging that can do a lot for relieving our nagging anxiety.
Clearly, I’m a fan even without science to back up the validity of my birth chart. But what if… there is something to Astrology? The more specific answers I seek, the more I question this myself.
Is Astrology an ancient science that the Church covered up, because it feared what it meant for the fate of the good and the damned?
Could it be that there is some way to prove the accuracy of Astrology, and maybe give the skeptics something to put in their pipes? Naturally, I had to check, just to make sure.
Scientific approach
On closer inspection, I realised that Astrology does seem to have a lot in common with the scientific method. It uses a set series of rules to make predictions about the natural world. Sounds good.
It also uses some testable ideas. Astrology isn’t all star sign horoscopes and generic statements: a branch of astrology that seeks to make specific predictions, can be verified. Too bad when these predictions are tested, the evidence doesn’t favour the validity of astrological ideas…
What about a scientific community to peer-review articles and other claims? Are there a healthy crew of critical Astrologers to cast a keen eye on each others work? Well, whilst there are plenty of conferences for Astrologers to share their findings and add to or update existing methods and techniques for reading the stars, and many certainly do argue like cats and dogs and scientists… I’m hesitant to say that critical thinking and scientific evaluation is of great importance to the astrology community at large.
As for research in the field, their certainly is research being done to find more accurate techniques and update current thinking. However, this research tends to be looking back at the past to inform our current approaches. Project Hindsight is a great example of this, and Zodiacal releasing is a technique that many astrologers swear by, that came from this rediscovery and translation of old texts.
But would a scientist look back to the words of the Greeks to see if they can improve their technique for treating infections? I kind of hope not.
Astrology may not pass our test for current scientific methods, but what about the research that is attempting to be scientific, has anyone found something we can use as ammunition against the skeptics?
Michel Gauquelin, a French psychologist might be our guy. He sought to prove that there is a relationship between the planets’ positions at the moment of birth and the direction of our lives. Gauquelin didn’t play around: from 1949, he spent 23 years researching this.
Arguably, the most successful of his studies is the one commonly referred to as the ‘Mars effect.’ He found a statistically significant correlation between having Mars in a ‘prominent’ position in the charts of professional athletes.
Critics of Gauquelin’s studies argue that he didn’t adjust the statistical significance of the Mars Effect for multiple comparisons and never addressed this glaring issue. Try as they might, scientists have failed to reproduce his work.
Sadly, Gauquelin’s critics may have got the better of him. He wrote in 1969: “The signs in the sky which presided over our births have no power whatever to decide our fates [or] to affect our hereditary characteristics.” After a nervous breakdown, Gauquelin ordered all his files destroyed and committed suicide in 1991, aged 60.
Carl Sagan neatly sums up the criticism of these studies as evidence to the effect of the planets on our lives:
“How could the rising of Mars at the moment of my birth affect me, then or now? I was born in a closed room. Light from Mars couldn’t get in. The only influence of Mars which could affect me was its gravity. But the gravitational pull of the obstetrician was much larger than the gravitational influence of Mars. Mars is a lot more massive, but the obstetrician was much closer.”
Ultimately, no one has yet proved or disproved astrology, and in my opinion, they might as well stop trying. It’s like expecting someone to prove that God or UFO’s do or don’t exist: a fool’s errand.
I think our time is better spent looking at the usefulness of Astrology, and how to make sure we’re practising in as ethical a way as possible, regardless of its scientific evidence.
The divinatory approach
My preferred — current — explanation of Astrology lies somewhere far, far away from the land of science.
Divination effectively means “to foresee; to be inspired by a god” and works by “supernatural means.” In any case, you could say the god you’re speaking to is a bearded man living in the clouds, or you could say you’re communicating to consciousness itself; an interconnected grid of energy… Either way, I’m not even going to attempt to give you a scientific argument for the validity of Divination.
The science train has left the station. But in its place, I hope to plant the seeds of something that has value even without science, without even attempting to be rational or objective.
It doesn’t matter how you practise Divination. I’ve heard of people using business cards and movie ticket stubs to give wildly accurate readings about people or events.
This means lumping Astrology in with the I Ching, Tarot, tea leaves and a whole gamut of other practises I had personally shunned… until Astrology. Much like how personality tests opened me up to Astrology; Astrology helped me see the potential value in these other techniques.
Here’s my metaphor that I’ve been using on my skeptical friends:
Let’s say you have something in your eye. You can’t see it, but you know something’s there, and it irritates you.
So you go to a mirror, to get an idea of where the offending object is, also you can understand what it is and how to deal with it, probably by carefully removing it.
Astrology is the same, to me. I can be aware of something in my life causing me distress or joy for that matter, but it can be confusing and I’d likely benefit from seeing it more clearly.
Enter Astrology, your personal sky mirror.
In the same way that talk therapy offers not direct solutions to our problems or hangups, but a way of examining them; bringing what’s hidden to the surface so we can see more clearly, Astrology is just another tool for studying our own psyche. Take the Rorschach test. You may have seen these inkblot tests recreated in films, TV or even experienced one yourself. Some psychologists use this test to examine a person’s personality traits and emotional functioning, particularly in cases where a patient might be reluctant or unable to describe their thinking processes openly.
I’ve studied my birth chart (a chart that maps the position of the planets and luminaries at the exact time and place we were born, as well as their relation to each other, the Zodiac signs and the areas of life they might show up) like a Rorschach test.
In it, I’ve recognised my insecurity around self-expression, my need for travel to foreign lands, and a reminder as to why I prefer to be self-employed. We’re all complex creatures, living messy lives, faced with multiple decisions to make each day… and a tool like your birth chart is one way to make sense of it all and neatly define the parts you choose to see.
In this way, Astrology is a divinatory tool. The difference in my approach to the traditional definition of Divination, is that the entity I speak with is… Me.
I’m interested in Astrology for self-knowledge, just like my beloved personality tests. I don’t use it to predict world events, for the same reasons I don’t try to predict the stock market. Astrologers may see trends and get a vague sense of what’s to come, but most of the time they, like all of us, depend on chance alone — and moreover, their interpretation of the events.
So, can we call Astrology a Science?
Believing in Astrology means different things to different people. Maybe some people have to believe in these practises in a more concrete way to get value from them. Maybe some dismiss the value in them altogether because they can’t find scientific evidence for them.
Can we use objective evidence (the movement of the planets) to make subjective inferences? Should we? Personally, I have no interest in calling Astrology a science, but that’s because I’m not looking for that from my playtime with the planets. My fear is that in trying to convince our skeptic friends to see it’s value, we call Astrology a science with no way to back this up. If anything, this is only going to frustrate those who have a firm grip on what science is and what it isn’t, and we’ll push them even further away from our beloved study of the skies.
Are you an Astrology Seeker or Skeptic? Listen to two friends from each camp discuss the potential value and potential harm of believing in Astrology on the Seeker and the Skeptic Podcast
