Astronomy Is Not Astrology
Or why criticisms need to be informed in order to have value
By MARTIN REZNY
So, I have been doing some more research for my upcoming book about the estranged relationship between astrology and science and I came across another video where a professional astronomer decided to quickly and easily explain why astrology is total and utter nonsense. This time, it was Dr. Becky:
Feel free to watch her video before you read the rest of my article, but there isn’t really any new information in it, if you have seen any single debunking of astrology before in your life.
She talks about signs not being what they used to be due to precession, she cites some obviously bad sun sign horoscopes she randomly found online, she comments on how astrological literature contradicts itself, obviously without having done any serious review of it, and she explains, correctly but irrelevantly, that planets and stars can’t affect our lives directly.
In a way, it’s a neat summary of the collectively shared opinion among astronomers of why astrology is rubbish. She even assumes that signs have been chosen fully arbitrarily and she briefly complains how bad it is that astrologers get paid for this bullshit.
The way in which it is not so neat is that it shows that astronomers have decided they’re done with the subject decades ago, not learning or coming up with anything new on the subject.
Which is frustrating, given that all of these criticisms have already been addressed, adequately, by some of the more self-respecting astrologers or even scientists. Which means that astronomers refuse to respond, to engage in an actual debate. It shows they don’t care, including to know anything substantial about the actual history of their own discipline.
Going Through the Motions, Again
In the interest of not sounding vague, let’s go through the rebuttal real quick. The main skeptical argument that signs have shifted due to precession has in fact been addressed thousands of years ago, on record, in Tetrabiblos by Ptolemy. The Western tropical astrology is seasonal, meaning that signs are sections of the year and constellations mainly serve as visual markers.
In this context, the signs could be completely arbitrary and would still make all kinds of practical sense — you can use a made-up constellation for navigation, orientation in the sky, as a mnemotechnic device, etc.
However, if you actually read the definitions of signs across astrological literature, you’ll see that there are all kinds of systems to how signs are defined, meaning that constellations, at least in our western tradition, weren’t picked randomly. To list and explain some of these systems, the signs are:
- Weather analogies — in many astrological books, you will find explanations of personalities as manifestations of the weather in the part of the year when the given signs are born. Summer signs are more hotheaded, winter signs are more cold and rational, etc. Of all the natural phenomena, weather, or elements, are actually the most logical choice of a basis for a natural analogy for human personality. Also, using astrology to understand and communicate weather patterns is the obvious first real practical use of astrology by ancient civilizations. So that crops don’t fail.
- Combinatoric numerological exercise — the zodiac is a holistic ideal typology, arguably superior to anything in modern theory of personality or qualitative science in general, given that it can give you your basic twelve distinct types (all unique permutations of three qualities and four elements, each with their own distinct definitions), but which also has a mechanism for scaling the system up to an arbitrarily granular level of precision of beyond billions of logically distinct personality types. This is a logical system — opposite signs must have opposite traits, signs that share an element or a quality therefore have something in common, etc.
- Psychoanalytical educational myths — if you like Greek classics, like scientists often do, but you think that astrology is stupid, your position makes no sense. The signs and planets are the Greek pantheon, they are the Greek mythology. A mythology that still resonates so much because it has captured universals of human nature. The signs are that, a chart mapping distinct states of human nature as Greeks understood it. The planets were their gods, forming a model of psyche that puts id-ego-superego to shame (Sun is ego, Mercury is intellect, Moon is heart, Venus is comfort, Mars is ambition, Jupiter is blessing, Saturn is limitation, etc.) while signs represent the differences between people as agents of “gods”.
The whole mythology angle is of key importance here. Greek mythology, especially as it applies to astrology, isn’t just a fiction. It’s supposed to describe real phenomena. You could say psychological, subjective phenomena, but those are real, and figuring them out is immensely valuable. Nothing in modern psychology is obviously better at explaining people than the zodiac.
Conversely, even without any real meaning, making stars into compelling constellations with stories attached to them makes them very easy to learn and remember, makes one likely to share the knowledge. Some constellations have been around for tens of thousands of years. Many stories in mythology actually describe astronomical phenomena in a symbolic disguise.
This all is a fascinating history and a treasure trove of at least inspiration, if not knowledge. Deciding that astrology is bullshit and therefore renouncing all the hard work of ancient protoscientists is at minimum incredibly disrespectful to their legacy, and anywhere between ignorant and arrogant.
This is how science started — astronomy, mathematics, psychology, sociology, and more. Since then, we’ve made a lot of progress, but something was also lost. The level of art that is woven into the ancient science is awe inspiring, and functional. Not being able to turn science into an equally compelling story is a deficiency, not an advancement. Popularizers of science should take note.
What It Would Take to Disprove Astrology
As someone with a university education, including the methodology of research design, I would think that every professional scientist must know that you can’t just google a couple of horoscopes, declare them stupid, and consider a science older than recorded history, worked on by the brightest minds up to and including Kepler, to be wholly debunked.
That’s not how anything works. Do you want to demonstrate that horoscopes are dumb, or vague, or random? Okay, first, read a representative sample of astrological textbooks. In their entirety. If you do that, you should already start doubting you can do it, but maybe not. In that case, precisely define “dumb”, “vague”, or “random”, in a quantifiable fashion.
Then, design an experiment that tests whether a representative sample of horoscopes, actually created following what astrological textbooks say, is dumb, vague, or random, and to what exact extent. Ideally, in comparison to scientifically created personality profiles. Then different scientists should run the experiment many more times. Then, finally, perform a meta-analysis.
Congratulations, you have maybe proven that personal horoscopes are in some way useless. Now, you will have to go through all of this again for relationship astrology, disproving that synastry works. Then for mundane astrology, proving that astrology is worse than any existing theory in political science at explaining or predicting political events. Then for medical astrology, showing what harms it causes or how it compares to the placebo effect. And then there’s horary astrology. And elections. That’s a lot of work.
A lot of work that, frankly, hasn’t been done. As skeptics will point out, there have been tests of astrology, hundreds of them, including replications, but let me ask you this — what were they testing? The vast majority of them was testing the ability of subjects or astrologers to match blind astrology readings to themselves, to the subjects, or to scientific psychological profiles.
This kind of research design doesn’t prove that horoscopes are bullshit, and it doesn’t even begin to touch any of the other separate astrologies. Why should people be able to know themselves well enough to be able to reliably select a description that matches their personality? Astrologers in practice don’t match charts blindly to clients. Oh and BTW, CPI personality profiles have failed as well in the only frequently cited study — Carlson’s test from the 80s.
There could be a million more studies like this, executed perfectly, and it still won’t be any clearer whether any astrological claims are valid or invalid. Beyond that, there were a few tests of relationship astrology, but with offensively bad designs — testing whether the sun sign has impact on whom one marries or divorces. That’s not how relationship astrology claims it works.
Relationship astrology is about mutual planetary aspects between two people. Not mainly the Sun, either. What you need to test there are the aspects of Moon, Venus, and Mars, perhaps with the outer planets as well. As far as I can tell, this hasn’t been done by the skeptics at all, so we don’t know anything.
As for the mundane astrology, skeptics will say that astrologers can’t actually predict any events. Then if you point out all the times astrologers have predicted events, skeptics will say all of those just got lucky. Then if you point out that modern political science can’t predict anything either, skeptics might throw it under the bus as well, but that’s about all that anyone can do about it.
As for medical astrology, skeptics will simply declare it barbaric, medieval, and obviously wrong, mainly because they don’t actually know how it is supposed to work, or anything about the notable medical astrologers throughout history, and they will therefore not even feel a need to test it. And sure, astrology won’t fix a broken bone, but there’s a lot that you could test in terms of psychosomatic disease prevention or the effects of medical timing.
The Economy of Skepticism
Ultimately, I think the main issue here is that the few skeptics who have looked into astrology more closely have decided that doing all this work to definitively disprove astrology is just not worth the effort. Oh, they have done some things that already were a lot of work to cast doubt on astrology, it was just a lot less work than the necessary amount to do it properly that I outlined.
The only skeptical effort that ever approached comprehensiveness was that of Geoffrey Dean. If what you want is ammunition against astrology, this is the only website you ever need to visit:
While I can’t say Dean is strictly speaking unfair in any of his analyses, his bias against astrology is clear from the derisive tone which he sometimes uses in his commentaries and from the sense of wanting to be done with it already.
He’s always very quick to conclude that every failed test of astrology must have been definitely well-designed and conducted appropriately, that it disproves astrology, and that we don’t really need to do any more of them.
At the same time, he will spend any amount time investigating positive results from any test of astrology and stretch logic to its breaking point to find any hypothetical way why and how that test was poorly designed, suspiciously executed, or why it definitely didn’t prove anything, anyway. Even so, he failed to find any way of definitively explaining Gauqelin’s Mars Effect away.
And sure, you could say that his job as a skeptic isn’t to try to prove astrology, that burden is on the astrologers. But then, I fear I would be very disappointed by your definition of skepticism. Skepticism isn’t supposed to be a sports team, a warring tribe, a political party. You shouldn’t be against astrology being proven, you should only be against misinterpreted or no research.
This means that what’s needed here are skeptics and astrologers who will devote the same amount of effort to attacking their own position. To trying to improve the research designs of their “opponents”, who, in case it’s not clear, aren’t supposed to be their opponents. What’s needed are people who want to do all the research that can be done, so that we, in the end, as a species, know more than when we started with an objectively sufficient level of certainty.
I forgot which high-profile astrologer said it, but they said that astrology got a critic it deserves in Dean. Despite factoring in how much I personally disapprove of his style of skepticism, I would agree with that statement. Astrologers are, at present, mostly a bunch of disorganized dilettantes who don’t feel the need to do rigorous research to justify their claims or methods.
However, that’s not a reason to not confront scientific skeptics about the deficiencies in how they go about their skepticism. Even assuming that all contemporary astrologers are irredeemable charlatans, that still wouldn’t give skeptics the license to make uninformed, ignorant, or arrogant statements, to make bad research designs, or to scheme and politick to defeat “enemies”.
Maybe astrology, all of astrology, really is bullshit. My argument isn’t that it has been scientifically proven that astrology works, or that it is enough that astrology wasn’t disproven. My argument is that it has demonstrably not been tested enough, or in more precise terms, in any of the obvious right ways that matter. I’m perfectly willing to defend this statement as the fact that it is. If you disagree, great, please, tell me why. Any debate would be a leap forward.
