Could Astrology be proved ?
63As I said here, I don't believe in Astrology because it's too "unscientific" for me. What I mean by "unscientific" is that I have no proofs TODAY but if I have proofs tomorrow then may be I will change my hypothesis (see Science and Hypothesis by Henri Poincaré).
I don't say that Science would be the only mean to access Knowledge as I try to be open-minded to paranormal facts. Maybe there are some gifted people who have some psychics power who do know better than Science but it is their PERSONAL experiences, whereas Science is about UNIVERSAL, SHARABLE experiences for common mortals - which I belong to.
|
VTG 70s HIPPIE ZODIAK ASTROLOGY JEAN DRESS PATCH DOZEN
Current Bid: $9.99
|
|
Astrodice: Astrology Divination Fortune Telling Dice
Current Bid: $6.89
|
|
Only Way to Learn Astrology by Joan McEvers, Marion ...
Current Bid: $1.99
|
|
ASTROLOGER, PSYCHIC, ASTROLOGY CHART BY P. SQUIRES 10 M
Current Bid: $4.50
|
|
LASZLO HORTOBAGYI TERRA DEI ~OCCULT~TRANCE~PSYCHEDELIA
Current Bid: $6.99
|
|
LIBRARY of the OCCULT 2000+ rare vintage books 5 DVDs
Current Bid: $34.97
|
|
Strange Powers of Healing Brad Steiger Occult Mysticism
Current Bid: $2.95
|
|
The Amazing Uri Geller Psychic Book Occult 1975 Boo
Current Bid: $.49
|
So how could Astrology be proved that is how could we make some experiments to exclude so-called Barnum Effect ? Well by using what psychologists / Doctors use: probability inferences; there's no reason why we wouldn't have rights to use the same methods to do so because the Barnum Effect could be countered by double-blind experiments. As explained here:
"In a medical experiment, the comparison of treatments may be distorted if the patient, the person administering the treatment and those evaluating it know which treatment is being allocated. It is therefore necessary to ensure that the patient and/or the person administering the treatment and/or the trial evaluators are 'blind to' (don't know) which treatment is allocated to whom".
In the case of Astrology, one would have to make sure that the characters assessment of the persons in the experiment would be as objective as possible, for example by questioning their relatives without revealing the purpose of the questions (don't tell them it's for proving Astrology or they may try to match with the sign !).
This kind of experiments should be facilitated by the existence of Astrological Softwares like Decoz (free version exists) because some tasks could be automated thanks to some techniques like Data Mining which allows to treat a lot of statistical datas at once and even help to discover potential correlations (in the case of Astrology correlation between the sign and some aspects of a character).
Now this kind of "proof" is not really considered harsh "proof" because correlation doesn't obligatorily imply causality (this kind of fallacy has been used by the pseudo-scientists like Eugenists) but it's more a clue that there may be something worth to be investigated (that is to say funded with money to do further research :) ).
PrintShare it! — Rate it: up down flag this hub
Comments
Great article. I've had a quite heated discussion on another forum re the use of astrology and it's lack of scientific proof. I became quite passionate about his lack of arguement, basically he kept saying it was not proovable. Yet data, analytical statistics are used in science all the time. But lets not go into this type of discussion. Doesn't Psychology go under Pseudo-Science as well.
Horoscopes relate to Signs, the zodiac sign which is a very small part of the effects of the astrological makeup. It basically covers only where the Sun was at the time of your birth. Yet an astrological chart takes into account all the planetary aspects in a chart. So to actually understand astrology, you need to understand planetary forces. Gets complicated doesn't it. And it is. Astrology is not an easy 'craft' to master.
But once studied at length, and once you get a grasp of astrology in relation to psychological traits and the relationship to your own character tendencies, then it takes a whole different tragectory.
I now separate the word horoscope from astrology as it is very obvious that horoscopes are hyped to the hilt, prey on the gullible and lead teenagers into ignorance, making sure if Libran you stay away from Capricorns. It is so OFF in regard to it's original use. Your reference to the Barnham effect does apply to horoscopes, ie those snippets you read in magazines and newspapers telling people they are going to have difficulty in their job this week. That's entertainment and not at all factual, yet people organise their lives around those 'gems' of rubbish.
Science is not about proof. It's about falsification. To be scientific, a theory must be falsifiable. Astrology has never yet been put forward as a falsifiable theory. It is therefore non-science. Science does not claim to be true. It merely claims not yet to have been proven false. Read Karl Popper.
Paraglider:
"It merely claims not yet to have been proven false. Read Karl Popper."
Sure since I've been statistical engineer :) - see my profile - that's what I'm talking about: statistical inference which is based on the concept of "not yet to have been proven false".
See also Science and Hypothesis from Henri Poincaré. It's the same idea.
+++
ervin says:
13 hours ago
"The best argumentation about astrology for me is in Carl Sagan's COSMOS TV series."
ok I will watch it.
===
Jewels,
I don't agree with you with Astrology and I used in the past to behave like the guy above; now I find stupid to be too harsh on the contrary I now think that you best enrich yourself when you debate with somebody you don't agree with. In fact I even try my best to give the tool to the adversary for him to prove me wrong :)
So don't be too upset when people overeact. I understand your reaction because you may have a deep conviction but when you are on the minority side you must make some effort to convince the majority. Many times here I give some information which may astonish the majority of people and I try my best not to hurt them.
Try not to hurt people. If they are agressive just give up and find someone else.
I'm not too concerned with whether astrology could be a science or not, personally, but I do applaud any and all questioning of its validity because blind belief in anything is something I can't support or encourage. This article certainly sparks some good questions and I think Jewels explains the nature of astrology pretty well (as opposed to predictive horoscopes and the whole "cancers can't be friends with virgos" or whatever).
To me astrology is an artform or maybe a martial art. It requires a willingness to know that you're accepting some general ideas that you might not be able to go out and prove, but I already do that anyways with plenty of other things that I don't have the time nor interest to thoroughly investigate.
For me it boils down to this: the moon effects the tides, the sun radiates the plants and makes them grow so why wouldn't celestial bodies other than these two perhaps have some sort of effect on life on this planet? Yes it's a question as opposed to a dogma that I'm offering, but I still think it's good food for thought :)
For The Love - You've hit the nail. In my experience the planets DO have an effect on life on this planet, that is the knowledge of astrology that I am referring to. But to explain that and for people to get an experiential understanding of it is very difficult. To discern the energies is difficult but not impossible. The human species has lost the ability to feel at subtle levels let alone the energies of one planet over another. It's really a matter of not looking hard enough, you see but you don't see. Star gazing has fascinated us for centuries, since the dawn of time I'll bet! If you do it long enough, with all seriousness, you can differentiate the sensations of one star to another, and/or one planet to another. They actually feel different. Just like different levels of electrical voltage has a different effect on our physical bodies, you either get a nice buzz or you get fried, the planets have similar effects. But so subtle are the flavors to the untrained, it is dismissed as nonesense. More often it's dismissed because one can't be bothered, or it's too hard.
To The Counterpunch, I would like to thank you for not blasting me with a sense of self-righteousness that often happens when a serious discussion on this type of subject arises. I do take this knowledge seriously and use it in a practical way (and sometimes non-practical way!) Great hubbing with you.
Oh, and I love the comic strip. Astrology also has lots and lots of maths. But astronomers are still calculating!
You're welcome Jewel :)
ForTheLove it doesn't matter what label you want to put on things, what counts is you need to know if it has some degree of truth then you need a scientific process which is not limited to Science : it is used by Sherlock Homes, it is used by Bertrand Russell (in his book about the scientific method applied to Philosophy) etc.
Max Heindel did allot of work on astrology and medicine. How is he regarded in the scientific world. Not being in that arena, I'd be interested to hear your opinion, or what you've heard if anything.
Max Heindel ? Well never heard of him. I just leant that he was president of Theosophic Society as successor of Mme Blavatsky which I talk about here:http://hubpages.com/hub/The_Aryan_race
Later he became a Rosicrucian which is for me kind of the same.
So clearly I wouldn't trust him: like all these organization they try to attract people looking for some spirituality to recruit them or have sympathy with their deceptive organization.
Yeah anything "mystical" gets murky... in regards to what you're saying, Counterpunch, about the truth for me the way I practice astrology it works out so for me its true. Now whether that works to same degree of effectiveness for everyone, I can't know. I don't hold it as an "ultimate" truth like a religion or something like that, I just know it helps me understand and feel comfortable with certain parts of people I otherwise might not. :)
I respect your personal belief as long as you say it's not a scientific truth or ultimate truth as you mentioned yourself :)
I would be pleased if you would try to show me some clues about your "thruth" though I will probably say it's due to coïncidence since I can see no fundamental reasons for astrology to be true ;)
I asked that question re Max Heindel because I was searching through some very old texts he had written. He used astrology in medicine so I was curious to make comparisons between what he had written and my own experiences. There were some freaky 'coincidences' that I could not ignore. But in the same light, as you mentioned above, there is truth and their is coincidence. Yet I often find the two to cross paths without obvious explanation. So it goes back to scientific data, statistics then. Yet this would only be put into the category of pseudo science and so is not credible. Regardless of whether Max Heindel banded with the Rosicrucians and Madam Blavatsky (whom I do not side with), his works are worth reading. Yet if there is no knowledge of the workings of astrology and it's relationship to psychology, and cause and effect in regard to planetary forces, then the 'craft' of astrology will be regarded as rubbish.
Thanks for allowing me to use the grey matter further on this subject. It's good for me!
>So it goes back to scientific data, statistics then. Yet this would only be put into the category of pseudo science and so is not credible.
Well the problem is that numbers can't encompass Knowledge. Let's take another field which is Technical Analysis. Even in that field some people can't believe in it so it's even worse for Astrology ;)
>Regardless of whether Max Heindel banded with the Rosicrucians and Madam Blavatsky (whom I do not side with), his works are worth reading.
Well he's more than just part of the band, he is the successor of Madam Blavatsky. I don't say he doesn't have knowledge some truths but when it is mixed with propaganda that you won't be able to decipher when one has been seduced by its core idea. So I may read Mme Blavatsky or Heindel but with a very critical eye.
Thanks for your comment. We may not agree but I like to discuss with people who don't have the same point of view than me because that's how one can grow :)
Well as far as astrology having a degree (varying degrees on some occaisions) of truth it's difficult to just point to something that "proves" it's true because each person's chart is something like a chemical formula. It's not as simple as "Leos have great hair" and "Scorpios keep secrets well", that's just the newspaper style look at astrology. I've recorded the moon's phases and made some notes before as to what tends to happen during certain signs and notice during a moon in Aries there seems to be a lot more law enforcement activity and during moon in Taurus people (that I'm around atleast - who may or may not know a thing about astrology) tend to eat more. Small things and could they be coincidence? Certainly. Then again even gravity is just a theory, you know? So I suppose I've seen enough Pisces act like how I've come to see Sun in Pisces act and so forth, so on that I've decided that's far enough to put some belief behind the theory of astrology and study it further. Would I call it a science? It'd certainly be hard to measure scientifically and it'd be one massive project but I think it'd be worth testing out so long as the scientist actually took the time to learn enough about astrological theory to perform decent experiments and not some half-baked attempt to simply disprove it and move on to the next subject. :) I've got a couple good sites that might be interesting to you if you ever want to run your birth data through and see what they tell you.. let me know and I'll get them to you
OK give me your sites :)
If the question is how can you try and prove or disprove astrology without using the Barnum effect, you will have to understand what the Barnum effect really proves, and what makes a valid experiment. If you set out to prove something on the topic of astrology, then you must assure that the items used for experimenting have anything - if not everything - to do with astrology. This means, opposite to what to mention a name James Randi had done using the Barnum effect, that you will have to create accurate readings for each test subject's natal chart (entire astrological chart at birth), and not some randomly put together human characteristics, which are a typical example of what the Barnum effect consists of. If you put together random human characteristics, you will not be examining astrology since none of the items used in the experiment are obtained through astrology - the most you will be able to prove is that human beings are subjective under then influence of society, about their own personality.
I hope I'm still making sense up to now; in case I'm not, I'll try and take it apart into a few lines: what you need --> accurately written astrological natal charts. Absolutely AVOID all and any randomly written personality descriptions. Test subjects of whom you will have to get the exact birth data (year, month, day, hour, minute and place of birth). MAKE SURE you have at least ONE aspect which can be tested on validity and that this aspect is obtained using an astrological method. IF YOUR EXPERIMENT DOES NOT CONTAIN THIS - like Randi's experiment - THEN YOU CANNOT VALIDLY SAY YOU HAVE TESTED ASTROLOGY!
What you also need to know concerning astrology, is that a natal astrological chart only depicts your physchological situation AT BIRTH. If you test people aged 25-50, you will have to consider their upbringing and the influences they have had since birth. Even though there are astrological methods that predict future events using tendencies in the natal chart, I think that is pretty pointless because using a natal chart to predict the next week for a 25 year old, would be calling that 25 year old a new born. We are all the product of our initial personalities (when we are born), our education and upbringing, and our environments. If you want to test a natal chart, you will have to take away the other two influences. If you want to test whether you can predict tendencies on the basis of planetary positions, you should take away personality-at-birth and upbringing. Either of the traits or behaviours that a person exhibits that show traces of either of the other influences, should be disregarded.
And that is - I think - where many (somewhat biased) researchers have gone wrong; they took all psychological influences on a human being as a whole instead of dividing them up into the bits that they are. I also strongly believe that you should disregard any acute influences such as substances which are altering to the personality and mental diseases; for example bi-polarity. If someone exhibits traits of this disease, first make sure whether or not it is bi-polarity or borderline, the difference between both being that bi-polarity is a disease and borderline is a personality disorder and is a life-long personality trait which you are born with. SO Psychopathology as the study of mental diseases is called, should be filtered out of the experiment as well.
Hope these tips helped. Of course, it depends on which aspect of astrology you want to prove or disprove and how influential your natural bias would be on the subject. But still, I hope it helped - if nothing more, I hope it helped in understanding how different parts of astrology work! ^^
To conclude; the Barnum effect only proved how subjective people are when they are presented with completely random personality traits which might or might not apply to them: be them positive (for example: you are extremely intelligent) I cannot imagine anyone would argue them. Be them negative (for example: you are a right ignorant litte... you get the idea) I couldn't imagine anyone who would agree. Whether they're truthful or not ^^
ervin says:
2 years ago
The best argumentation about astrology for me is in Carl Sagan's COSMOS TV series.