I can accept conspiracy theories and disbelieving the known consensus.
I just can't accept a person who, in the age where we know exactly how planets move and what they are, decided to believe they have correlation with psychology.
It's the worst. It shows the person doesn't even try to connect cause and effect in a meaningful way, and in astrology this is all there is to it. No epistemology. No logic. It's one thing to believe in unfalsifiable things, and another to believe in falsifiable things that we fully understand and have no causual relationship.
To a raised atheist all religions are not far removed from belief in Santa Claus. But to someone with religious people in the family cutting them off may come not as natural as of strangers with astrology brain.
Either way, I don't see a huge epistemological problem with a person believing these things. They might be believing wrong things but at least they do it for reasonable reasons.
You need to distinguish between epistemology and logic. It's much more important to get your epistemology correctly than your logic. It's ok to be wrong with your reasoning, you can still have an intelligent discussion. But talking to a person without epistemology is like talking to the wall. You're playing chess and he's playing checkers.
If the other person doesn't epistemologically need cause and effect relationships to believe in something, and it doesn't matter to him, I can't have an intelligent discussion. I can't reason without cause and effect, and if it doesn't matter to the other person it's completely hopeless.
I come from a religious background, born and raised catholic, and even in our indoctrinating upbringing it was made clear that the new testament isn't eyewitness testimony. It's a written story of something someone said. Given the age of the material this is the best we're going to get, obviously, but it's not quite as clear cut as it might seem.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Testament
" They were written between approximately 70 and 100 AD, and were the end-products of a long process of development; all are anonymous, and almost certainly none are the work of eyewitnesses."
I mean, here we are, talking about something that starts with those planetary bodies.
If you drop hallucinogens into water, it could be perceived to others that people would be getting drunk off water, which would be, in effect, turning water into wine. The story could have come from this, easily plausible.
When people say they "literally did so and so" do you freak out about calculating the possibilities of their specific mention or do you sit back and understand what parables, allegory, and stories are?
Besides, If you don't believe it really happened, what's the point of picking apart the story?
but plenty of Luke and Matthew underpin Christian ethics, and have been the justification for building schools, charities, hospitals, etc. for centuries.
people will hear what they want to hear, e.g. Loaves and Fishes vs. Angry Revaluation Jesus, but at least there is an attempt at altruism there.
Astrology has all of the woo woo mythology without attempting any sort of actual altruism, just inane categorization.
Yes, you could say it's a metaphor, a symbolic vision or something else rather than something to be taken literally in religion, but the same could be said of astrology.
The world has forgotten to end a few times now.
Faith comes in many forms, in any undertaking human are involved in including science, watch out!
Not all Hindus believe in astrology, but very many do, and within contemporary Hinduism it is very much mainstream belief. And many Hindus who believe in astrology would reject the idea of drawing any firm boundary between their astrological beliefs and the rest of their religion. [0]
Hinduism is not the only religion to promote astrology: it is also a very common thing in contemporary Western Neopaganism/Wicca/etc. While contemporary Christianity is (with rare exception) anti-astrology, it was much more accepting of it in the Middle Ages, even into the early modern period – "papal astrologer" was once a real job description.
[0] https://iskconeducationalservices.org/HoH/lifestyle/expressi...
Not to give astrology or any particular belief system any credit, but how can one ever truly say that we "fully" understand anything in this reality?
This is a highly fallible trait that allows "science" to become a belief system in and of itself.
The irony of you letting that affect your mind is amusing.
This is literally the underlying context of the discussion
However, the few times that anyone has tried to verify astrological predictions, it's turned out to be false.
But I guess ignoring all religious people in the world is simply impractical.
I disagree about your interpretation of burning of religious books - surely that's more to do with people getting angry about their beliefs and culture being deliberately insulted. Burning a flag doesn't get people angry because of the impotence of whatever grouping the flag represents - it's because it's a direct insult to the people who value what the flag represents.
If we get to the punishments, things were clearly handed swiftly in the Old Testament. The Biblical concept of Hell as we know it (the place of eternal punishment) didn't emerge until the New Testament as it was in a way redundant.
And come on, we know holy texts are full of things which are clearly wrong, in exactly the same way astrology is. The temptation to gloss over them as ornamental bits is huge, but to believers they are doctrinal.
It's related to why MBTI lasted so long as "science" because it proved many concrete predictions through overfitting and hand-waving away errors as statistical anomalies rather than the pigeonhole principle at work. There are still plenty of people that think it valid. Perhaps ironically, MBTI even seems to making a comeback among many of the same people that are flocking to Astrology. If you're going to live by one pigeonhole fallacy you might as well live by more than one, I suppose.
So, if we interpret astrology as something explanatory, and there is no strong rational basis for it, then that means it is unlike those religious traditions that are rationally defensible. If astrology is a practical art, specifically, if it makes predictions based on some correlation between the positions of the stars and planets and whatever else, and this correlation happens to hold, then astrology is a more or less predictive model. (The "whatever else" also matter, as you could call the science of tides a kind of natural astrology because the moon does in fact have an effect on the tides.)
(FWIW, the Catholic Church rejects astrology, not as some "competing" doctrine, but as a pseudo-science and a superstition [0].)
> (FWIW, the Catholic Church rejects astrology, not as some "competing" doctrine, but as a pseudo-science and a superstition [0].)
Russian Orthodox church also rejects astrology as a superstition, or rather manifestation of paganism which is a competing doctrine. It also blesses missiles with holy water.
This needs more solid arguments. As is, it’s obviously complete bollocks.
What? From where do we derive our knowledge of the natural world and universe? How do we know, for instance, that the Earth revolves around the sun and not vice versa? Are you implying that we don’t know that, or are you implying our knowledge of this fact is a divine gift?
Most people act rationally and irrationally. So you can hold an irrational belief, i.e. that your religion is the One True Religion, and then take rational actions like going to church based on that irrational belief.
e.g. drugs can make you feel good, but is it rational to keep taking them until you are addicted?
I have only met a few "true atheists" -- people who do not deeply believe in some narrative that provides meaning and exists outside of the material world.
Really?! That's definitely by viewpoint. I don't talk religion but in my encounters with other atheists, I haven't gotten the feeling that any believe there to be some narrative.
you mean, people who don't believe there's a god (theism is a belief in a god, not just any belief or even any religion)
that's what an atheist is (which is the same thing as a "true atheist", as long as we're making up phrases)
a good example of an atheistic belief is "you should be excellent to each other, because it sucks when people aren't like that to you" - no god required
Generally atheists claim to be skeptical of all religion and mysticism regardless of whether it claims a "creator god". If you want to be pedantic and say someone who believes in ghosts, but not God is still be an atheist, well ok.
My point is that almost all people hold unexamined beliefs as non-material and unscientific as any religion. Hence they are not inherently more rational.
> be excellent to each other
I think the rule you are describing is not well defined at all. Are you treating them well because it's right, or because it's a benefit to you? If it's just comfort, then it only makes sense when it's convenient for you, or likely to be reciprocated.
Should you do what makes other people feel good? Or what is actually good for them? After all, it "sucks" when people try to make you do things. How would you know when to violate your rule of being "excellent"?
By having personal experience(s) of things that cannot be explained in any other way?
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miracle_of_the_Sun
By employing one's sense of logic?
* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35592365-five-proofs-of-...
You are misusing logic in the same way. You are disconnecting it from its value in order to justify a belief in a larger power. This is neither logical or rational.
The entire idea that religion is rational or logical is one that's been pushed since the late enlightenment era upon realizing that you cannot control others through religion unless they believe that you are operating rationally on behalf of a larger power. This is the trick. It's very effective!
Arguing deep topics with a few lines of text every few hours is no way to be persuaded. But it will all too easily confirm your current ideas simply because you will get tired of it and you will conclude that nobody has any valid arguments against your position. This is why you have to get really serious about it and study under people who have "been there and done that" already. You will have to take the time to go through the entire process it cannot be done online.
It is strange that Atheists immediately discount philophical, theological and other arguments. For example, personal experiences and accepting the testimony and authority of those you trust is perfectly rational. It's not fullproof but it's still rational to do so, because there are many sorts of things that we have to accept as true based on such evidence.
Ask any (mostly pre-industrial) farmer or sailor: the positions of the sun and the moon are profoundly influential to their day-to-day lives.
Even I, an urban, post-industrial home office laborer make meaningful changes to my activities depending on whether the sun is in the sky.
Religion pretty much always involves beliefs that are as easy to problematize epistemologically as astrology is, but there are real differences in the kinds of people who are into astrology or neopaganism and the kinds of people who are Catholics.
When a religion is established and dominant, a lot of people engage with it in a detached way just because it's expected of them. They 'believe' essentially by default. They submit themselves to certain absurd beliefs as part of the tradition, but not all of them (e.g., the existence and presence of demons, for many Christians) are operative in their lives. People who participate in religions in that way can be very rational in a slightly strange way, with exceptions carved out just for religion.
I don't see this with 'serious' (i.e., metaphysical realism about the supernatural) belief in woo, at least among people like that in my life.
Some of the world's religions can start off from a basis of logic:
* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35592365-five-proofs-of-...
https://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/13752
> Feser’s formalization of this argument appears around page 35. It has 49 premises. I shit you not. Most of them are uncontroversial on some interpretation of the words he employs (that doesn’t mean they are credible on his chosen interpretation of those words, but I’ll charitably ignore that here), except one, Premise 41, where his whole argument breaks down and bites the dust: “the forms or patterns manifest in all the things [the substrate] causes…can exist either in the concrete way in which they exist in individual particular things, or in the abstract way in which they exist in the thoughts of an intellect.” This is a false dichotomy, otherwise known as a bifurcation fallacy. It’s simply not true that those are the only two options. And BTW, this Premise, is the same key premise (hereafter always hidden) in all five of his arguments. We can thus refute all of them, by simply refuting this single premise (more on that later).
> In an article at his blog, pop atheist writer Richard Carrier grandly claims to have “debunked!” (exclamation point in the original) Five Proofs of the Existence of God. It’s a bizarrely incompetent performance. To say that Carrier attacks straw men would be an insult to straw men, which usually bear at least a crude resemblance to the argument under consideration. They are also usually at least intelligible. By contrast, consider this paragraph from the beginning of Carrier’s discussion of the Aristotelian proof:
[…]
> As near as I can tell after reading and rereading those mind-numbingly obscure passages, what Carrier is criticizing is an argument that tries to show that God is the cause of the universe arising from nothing. And as near as I can tell, his objection is something to the effect that if we think carefully about what a “nothing-state” would be, we will see that that theistic conclusion isn’t warranted. Other scenarios, such as a multiverse scenario, are no less likely or even more likely. Of course, this has, again, absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with what the Aristotelian proof actually says, and so Carrier’s objection would be completely irrelevant even if it were at all clear what that objection is. Carrier’s readers will learn as much about what my Aristotelian argument actually says as they would if they’d read an automotive repair manual instead. Only that would have been more lucid and interesting reading.
* https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2018/02/carrier-on-five-pro...
* Schmid, J.C. Stage One of the Aristotelian Proof: A Critical Appraisal. SOPHIA 60, 781–796 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-021-00835-7
* https://philpapers.org/archive/SCHSOO-8.pdf
Which Feser responds to:
* https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2021/07/schmid-on-aristotel...
Also:
* Oppy, G. (2021). On stage one of Feser's ‘Aristotelian proof’. Religious Studies, 57(3), 491-502. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0034412519000568
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham_Oppy
Oppy and Feser had an online discussions / debates:
* Can We "Prove" that God Exists? | Graham Oppy vs Ed Feser: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XoVDutpB4Cw
* Are There Any Good Arguments for God? Ed Feser vs Graham Oppy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-80lQOlNOs
* After-Show Q&A with Graham Oppy & Ed Feser https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XoEGIfrJzEE
No, they do not. Aristotle's Argument from 'Motion':
1. Some things in the world are changing. (Observation)
2. Whatever is changing is being changed by another.[1] (Lemma 1)
3. There cannot be an infinite regress of instrumental changers.[2] (Lemma 2)
4. Therefore, there must be a changer that is not itself being changed by another.
Obviously this God would bear no resemblance to any of the popular Abrahamic Gods.
Nonetheless, anyone who subscribes to the simulation hypothesis cannot realistically call themselves an Atheist, by definition.
You cannot control people while also pushing the limits of humanity, they are mutually exclusive. To ignore this is to ignore religious systems were always about control and order, not progress.
Islamic civilisation would have never existed without Islam the religion. Even if we suppose the Arabs might have expanded into an empire under someone other than Muhammad, the end result would have looked very different. Islam was the glue that held together an empire composed of many different ethnicities, cultures, languages, tribes; without Islam, they would not have had that glue.
> You cannot control people while also pushing the limits of humanity, they are mutually exclusive. To ignore this is to ignore religious systems were always about control and order, not progress.
The first few thousand years of human civilisations were all about power and control. They did a perfectly good job of pushing the then-existent limits of humanity despite lacking individualism. It is only as we get into the modern period that individualism began to produce real benefits (new ideas, science, technology); but without that earlier anti-individualism, it would never have had the economic foundation it needed to produce those benefits. Even in the modern period, the benefits of individualism have mainly been something pursued by the upper and middle classes, economically sustained by the exploitation of the working class and by colonialism.
We also really don't know what the future holds. The religious fundamentalism of the Puritans led to the founding of the English colony of Massachusetts; maybe decades or centuries from now, religious fundamentalists will end up playing a major role in colonising our solar system – they may have motivations to establish colonies that secular people lack.
I'm not aware of a single civilization where free-thinking turned a poor society into a prosperous one. It's always the other way around: free-thinking individualism is a luxury enjoyed by the descendants of religious, orderly, and well-controlled people.
Indeed, ironically, free-thinking individualism is directly rooted in Protestant Christianity, which emphasizes the personal (rather than communal) relationship with God, and having lag people read and interpret the Bible. Do you think it’s a coincidence that the most individualistic societies on earth just happen to be Protestant?
In my experience, when you get an individual in the right setting, there's a high likelihood you can get them to admit doubt in the reality of their own religion, upon which they may also state that they still "choose to believe" anyway because their religion gives them both a moral framework and a community.
Astrologists are usually the opposite. They start out by telling you something like "I don't know if I believe in any of it, but I find it interesting." However, upon further conversation revealing more mystical thinking, it becomes apparent that they do believe to at least a fair extent, but are just too embarrassed to reveal their belief until they know you won't act judgmental towards them.
On the face of it, yes, religions are (from my understanding) largely made up of beliefs that are just as non-scientific as astrology. The escape hatch that religions have is that they are founded on a question that is largely unprovable. What astrology is based on is a fraudulent attempt at answering questions through what should be demonstrable mechanisms, and it doesn't matter whether facts disprove every single assertion in front of their very own eyes. Hell, at least religions have largely managed to change their views on the age of the Earth and whether dinosaurs existed, even if they still get aspects of those facts wrong. Astrology doesn't adapt to new information at all.
For those reasons, I see Astrology, unlike most other religions, as a black hole of belief. If someone believes in it, I really do feel sorry for them, and I also have no interest in having a conversation with someone that irrational. Even flat-earthers, whose beliefs are just about as dumb as that of Astrology, are more interesting to talk to and will at least be able to display flawed reasoning. Astrology is about as irrational as it gets, and people whom I've known who believe in it usually are either set in their ways or are extremely gullible that you can convince them of practically anything.
Sorry, but the average religious scholar is at least 1000% smarter than Astrologists. I try to be even handed with everything, but I can't here. Astrology is just a trap.
EDIT: Another difference between Astrology and other theological beliefs is that it is not based on faith. Astrologists, once they've been convinced there's something to it, usually lack sufficient doubt. Having faith means admitting that one doesn't know for sure. In that sense, there is a certain rationality to a religion like Christianity, even if I don't think that god exists in reality. Most astrologists only speak in uncertainty because they don't want to be judged for believing something so unreasonable. It's not because they know what they don't know; they actually think that they know. Just try the next time you have a conversation with someone who says they believe in any form of Astrology; the more you talk to them, the more they will reveal their certainty. And yes, there are plenty of religious people who think they know the truth with certainty, but chances are they don't understand their own religion if that's how they think, and true belief doesn't really describe the majority of people. Most religious people have faith, if they aren't just going along with the song and dance.
-- C.S. Lewis
I have been bored to death by flat earthers at parties before. If that’s their takeaway message, then so be it. There are many interesting people to meet everywhere anyway.
After all, science has undeniably caused more harm to the world than the belief in astrology.
Most of what we think we know as individuals is actually just a set of beliefs (often never tested) to which we heuristically assign some probability of truth. When you really start to dig yourself, you often discover that scientists, like any humans, are not immune to religiosity. They believe some thing is possible, or that some other thing is not. Those beliefs tend to color how the research is done. It also seeps into the culture of a society that has learned to so overly rely on "what the science says", that what it remains silent about is mistaken as untruths. Research must start with a hunch, a belief. But beliefs are often consensual and if the consensus is strong, it can be very difficult for a competing theory to hint at a possible different direction, even with supporting evidence. Our history books are full of examples. We set out to study a misunderstood phenomenon, but because there is a strong consensual belief that it must have certain properties, we approach our explorations with those premises as established truths. When we get stuck, we have to wait for an entire generation to die off to reorient the research (as Max Planck remarked).
Having observed the above in my own diggings into certain topics that (luckily) have some scientific documented intersects, I'm now reeducating myself to have less of the conditioned response of taking my own beliefs (e.g. astrology is probably BS) too seriously, when evaluating people's intelligence if they believe the opposite.
Applying the process of science to astrology causes the whole edifice to quickly crumble[1], that's why it can be dismissed out of hand. Not just because of what we think we know about the universe.
Questioning popular scientific beliefs in no way implies that things like astrology gain credibility. It is not a simple two way spectrum of truth.
You shouldn't, though. Belief in astrology is certainly irrational, but it's not incompatible with being intelligent. In fact, the more intelligent a person is, the higher the chance that they have at least some irrational belief, because it takes intelligence to weave together a plausible-sounding chain of reasoning for why the belief is true.
Broadly, belief in irrational things such as this are highly correlated with people being insecure, afraid, and/or feeling that they have little control over their lives. You can see the correlation in populations between how insecure the population is and belief in this sort of thing.
So, don't look at it as indicative of intelligence. It's an emotional/social thing, not a brainy thing.
I find your take on people who believe in Astrology condescending. I know intelligent and accomplished people who believe in Astrology. The explanation is very simple: they simply didn't think it through and keep checking Astrology predictions because they find them entertaining.
I put it as opposed to astrology where we clearly know it's wrong, and the even worse part is that we had no reason to think it was true in the first place. It's just nonsense that came out of nothing, without even an attempt to ground itself with a reasonable connection to reality.
And yes, I am condenscending. If you go around believing random stuff and "simply doesn't think it through", that is precisely my problem with you. I'd rather a person who tries thinking and reaches the wrong conclusion than someone who "doesn't think it through". Such a person who doesn't even think should be more ashamed of himself than even the person who thinks wrongly.
I also find them entertaining. That doesn’t mean I believe them.
> The explanation is very simple: they simply didn't think it through
Something I rely on to predict the future is the kind of thing I would want to think through. That’s particularly hard to believe of “intelligent people” when checking that it’s nonsense takes very little effort.
There may be an education-intelligence gap that explains why astrology is not evidently false to those people though.
Not every intelligent and capable person is a rationalist. I'd say that normal people reflect little about truths, instead relying on feelings and word of mouth. It got us to survive all the way to 2023, it's not such a terrible approach.
Astrology's biggest role is drawing a map of how people relate to each other, it's not primarily about making claims of the physical world.
I don't think this happens to anyone, in this day and age. Belief in astrology is driven by aesthetics, romanticism, and maybe an initially detached engagement with the practice that yields positive results. But people who take astrology seriously don't reason their way into it.
Probably everyone adopts unreasoned beliefs, of course. We don't explicitly think through every single idea that is or seems to be operative in our behavior. But in my experience, extremely intuitive people (who also tend to be spiritual, religious, of into some other form of woo) also tend not to filter or sanity check their intuitions by thinking them through explicitly. (Obviously anyone can do that, and everyone does sometimes. Some people just do it less often.) And they're also more likely to (explicitly) hold onto beliefs that they can logically acknowledge they have good reasons to doubt. They know they're something wrong with the belief, but their thought which identifies something wrong with it is subordinate to the feeling that something is essentially right about it. That feeling can and will shift, but usually in response to processes that are mostly invisible, or in response to direct experience.
People like this aren't stupid, imo, even though being close to them definitely involves moments where 'they're so stupid!' feels like the easiest way to write off frustrating behavior or communication problems. Generally, intuition-forward people do manage to live reasonably coherent lives and don't do dangerously irrational things. They're just extremely frustrating to communicate with for people on the opposite end of the spectrum, and not often directly responsive to rational appeals.
I have a few people like this in my life and they all have a lot of wonderful qualities. I'm glad they're in my life. But like you, I'm pretty confident that people like that would be bad fits for me as life partners, or even roommates.
But often as I encountered it, some individual is also too cute to be treated rudely. This is a bit of dilemma, really. Because if you share what you've learned, then no matter how respectful you tried to make it look, they might still switch to defense mode and spoil the feelings.
So, the real question is, if a really cute girl that you like smiling in front of you, and she asks your "star type" (or "constellation"), what would you really do at that spot?
(BTW, you probably don't want to answer G, because I guess it's not hot enough. I'll try A next time)
Yeah that's all dandy until they refuse to learn things because it's against doctrine, start restricting your bodily autonomy and freedoms and ultimately make learning things that disprove their illusions punishable.
That's an oxymoron because stupidity is never cute. If she appeared cute before saying that, she certainly wouldn't after.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pceDfPLf2hw
Note: This is not an endorsement. It is just a pedantic refutation of your claim.
I personally choose to believe in UFOs, remote viewing, ghosts, and all manner of omen, just because it makes the world feel a little more mysterious in my every day life.
Yes, there is plenty of rational magic in physics and materialism, but none that I can encounter on a dark camping trip, or staying in a spooky house.
Nonsense can be fun!
When it comes to astrology, theory and practice are rather simple. Here's the hyper light version: Once upon a time, civilized communities were small, the gene pool was not yet diverse. "P" identified patterns and created narratives around these patterns. Children were parented and socialized using these narratives and so it seemed like these patterns were indeed natural occurrences. "V" didn't like the pattern her child was supposedly born under and raised it differently. Naturally, the child broke the patterns and the narrative. "Only" the children, who grew up close to "V" or her children kept diverging. Even today, people raise their children under certain narratives, with certain convictions, following patterns in thought, speech and actions. For some of those, more than enough actually, astrology actually hits bullseye more often than not. Some people crave the same kind of "higher order".
It's story telling, neuro-linguistic programming, socialization, marketing, rationality with bogus, unverifiable premises. The logic is sound until people decide to diverge from the norm, opening themselves up to all the variety in the reality outside the walled garden.
Astrology sign is an information preserving transformation on relative age to within a couple months of precision.
The thing that really annoys me are TV shows like "Indian Matchmaker" where they bring in a so-called Astrologer who can't even explain whether he uses the Western or the Vedic system. That's just insulting.
Which is also a fun comparison to make because the astrology symbols for planets directly relate to the old useless and outdated alchemical signs.
So yes, Astrology has some relevant historic interest, but it's so far detached from modern science that I think it is almost weird to bring up in that sort of context.
It's still available but all that's left are VHS transfers: https://youtu.be/EoBEruyOnSo
I guess what I'm really "on" about is how someone can visit a place like Stonehenge, and appreciate the precision of the ancient calendar systems, without being accused of supporting Bronze Age Druidism. But for some reason Astrology is held in a different category, subject to a special kind of opprobrium. I find that interesting in itself.
Also - Full Disclosure - I used to have fun with the "Astrolog" software for Linux and even wrote an XScreenSaver integration for it. It was just a way to have fun and break the ice with people. It's a well maintained project that's been around since the Web 1.0 days. You know, when it was easier to have quirky interests without being called out to explain yourself. Cheers. :)
There's nothing wrong with enjoying parts of it and appreciating how and why it was used historically.
There's of course opprobrium about teaching it in modern scientific situations such as (most) Planetarium lectures. Some of that is because Astrology accumulated so much psuedo-psychological/sociological baggage and many scientists I know don't want to touch that sort of mostly superstitious pigeonholing with a ten foot pole if they can avoid it.
But a lot of it is as simple as it is interesting in a history class. It's not science, it's not reflected in modern science. Wanting to put it into a science lecture or class is one of those "Teach the Controversy" things [1] (as I alluded to a few in the previous comment). There is no controversy, that science is formally and completely outdated. Teaching the "controversy" provides too much weight to an outmoded model that hasn't been viable scientifically in centuries. Teaching it next to the real science mistakenly implies that it may still be valid or useful scientifically. It lets people that religiously love something like the personality quiz aspects of Astrology pat themselves on the back for "believing in science" when its ties to modern science are historic at best. (It lets people that don't believe in scientific expertise yell "see, they are teaching that a controversy exists so clearly they have no idea and you shouldn't listen to experts".)
To return to your analogy, you can go to a place like Stonehenge and see/feel/smell the weight of history. A science classroom (including Planetariums) isn't supposed to be a history classroom or a library, and confusing the two hurts the goals and aims of science way more than it hurts history, in part because people can't see the weight of history in a science classroom. Similarly, too, it is hard to be accused of Bronze Age Druidism in modern times simply because no groups claim to be actively tied to Bronze Age Druidism. It's been centuries since most of them disappeared (or were slaughtered) or moved on to other beliefs. There are plenty of modern "New Age" people that actively claim to be deep believers in Astrology, especially all its "personality quiz" stuff. Astrology never went away.
Absolutely, love the quirky interests that you love. I had a phase in Middle School where I got deep into Astrology myself because it was a fun "LARP" of a sort to roleplay with friends, then that led to Tarot, and that led to a brief flirtation with card tricks and mentalism. (It may or may not have helped that all of those things are in relatively close proximity under the Dewey Decimal system.) I'd never take that sort of silly journey away from the next kid, even if I am worried about all the kids that never outgrow some of those phases. I do think the library is the better way to discover Astrology than a Planetarium, though.
You sound like a Taurus.
Let people enjoy things, the general socio-economic situation is already as shitty as one could imagine, asking people to be rational 100% of the time, with no beliefs, no nothing, is just a sign of socio-economic privilege.
Not the it's going to shake your beliefs in it. That's our difference I guess. When I'm wrong it's something I strive to fix, but when you're wrong, what do you do?
So believing random wrong things is something you do because you enjoy it? I believe things because I think they might be true, and you believe things because you enjoy believing them ?
What an alien (to me) epistemology.
So what do I need to do, convince you that thinking rationally is even more fun? Try reading Harry Potter and the methods of rationality.
Or doing math.
And how is socio economic related to this?
You're ironically just proving me right.
I think it's much more helpful to consider their beliefs in this area irrational or illogical rather than assume that this lack of logic applies universally to all of their knowledge.
Every single human that has ever lived has, at one point in time or another, held beliefs that are illogical and irrational. And nearly all of us still do hold such beliefs.
There are a lot of people who are highly regarded in history but who also believed in astrology, so you shouldn't be too hard on it. Do you feel similarly about people who believe in various religions?
These people believed in astrology to varying degrees:
Winston Churchill
J.P. Morgan
Nancy Reagan
Theodore Roosevelt (even displayed his horoscope in the Oval Office)
This is just a small sample.
Some of the smartest people we know, who gave us modern astronomy - Galileo, Kepler, et al - were into astrology.
I agree. One potential rub though is the time of year you're born impacts your relative age to your peers when entering school. This absolutely _would_ shift things subtly, but it has nothing to do with star patterns.
> I can tolerate conspiracy theories, or aliens, or whacky religions, but astrology is just so dumb.
To be honest, I find your epistemological lapse even more confusing than believers in astrology. There's no significant epistemological difference between eg astrological claims and religious claims. You don't even have to limit yourself "whacky" religions; any of the mainstream ones will do.
Doesn't that speak more about you than about them?Highly intelligence (IQ wise) people have also been into astrology (and alchemy, magic, etc.). Not just in the time of Newton (an avid follower of the above), but in our times too.
>I can tolerate conspiracy theories, or aliens, or whacky religions, but astrology is just so dumb.
That's a quite crude model of what's rational. Something doesn't have to follow physics to have utility (I mean, utility beyond "making astrologers money").
A less crude epistemology would focus on what makes astrology resilient and widespread throughout several millenia, and what kind of purposes it might serve, as opposed to focusing on whether its compatible with hard sciences, or the knee-jerk reaction that "it's because people are stupid".
I'm not much for astrology (I barely know my sign), but I've read a couple of posts about it, and there's something to be said for not jumping to conclusions about a phenomenon with a complex history.
Here's, for example, a classic failure in criticizing astrology that I've read about somewhere: many "rationalists" make fun of astrology's claim that we're supposed to be influenced by the stars, since (the argument goes) their gravity pull is too low to matter, besides the moon would influence many orders of magnitudes more.
But astrology doesn't claim that the stars influence us through gravity. It speaks about influence on the astral plane (which is some kind of different dimension), not through some mechanistic principle. And, of course, astrology is so much older than the discovery of gravity, that "rationalists" making this argument must not know history, or maybe just had a temporary brain fart in making that argument.
I'd say astrology is not that far removed from religion (which you say accept or tolerate). I also found this interesting note on astrology on a "metaphysical" blog:
"Before we go on, it’s probably necessary to note a few points that may come as a surprise to some of my rationalist readers. Yes, I know about the precession of the equinoxes; astrologers discovered the precession of the equinoxes. (Where did you think all that talk about the Age of Aquarius comes from?) Yes, I know that the constellation Aries is no longer in the 30° wedge of the ecliptic that astrologers call the zodiacal sign Aries. (Signs are not constellations and constellations are not signs; every beginner’s textbook of astrology explains that.) Yes, I know that the Earth revolves around the Sun and not vice versa; astrologers use the geocentric positions of the planets because we live on the Earth, not the Sun. (It’s the planetary positions relative to where you are that matter in astrology.) Finally, yes, I know that nobody knows how astrology works; so? It’s a thumping logical fallacy to insist that an effect can’t happen just because the cause isn’t known".
I consider them beyond reason so I don't even try. If a person's logic and epistemology lead to him believing in astrology, it shows a deeper problem and I don't hope to have an intelligent discussion with them any more than I expect to have an intelligent discussion with GPT2 or with a talking parrot.
I can tolerate conspiracy theories, or aliens, or whacky religions, but astrology is just so dumb. I can't see an intelligent person ever falling for it. Hell I would probably consider a flat earther with a tinfoil hat more intelligent.