Wasn’t there a bit of an issue between Boyle and Newton over separating out alchemy from science? Boyle wanted to compartmentalize the two fields whereas Newton saw it as one integrated whole. It’s hard to say which is worse since compartmentalization really opens a kind of cognitive dissonance. Unifying the whole seems weird at first but if you approach it rationally eventually you’d think they’d falsify all the strange beliefs.

Mekhong, I’m pretty skeptical that strong religious belief ends up entailing a kind of uncritical openness. That’s for two reasons. The first is that I think strong religious belief entails actually believing ones beliefs and thus disbelieving those claims that obviously contradict them. So I’d expect an inverse relationship just from that. The second reason is that as you note there are very intelligent critical rational people with strong religious beliefs. So while I’m open to there being a correlation between uncriticalness and strong religious belief I don’t think it’s a causal relationship.

I’m suggesting that only as a starting point for discussion, and am not proposing it as an actual hypothesis — I have no actual scientific (there’s that word again!) support for it.

Historically astrology only started to be rejected with early modern science. I remember a letter from Descartes to Galileo, IIRC, in which they decided to ignore Bruno, whose science was mixed in with astrology. But for them it was a real question that had to be answered. Kepler worked as an astrologer, though he probably didn’t believe it. Newton had beliefs that we would regard as occult, though not astrological if I remember rightly.

Astrology is a historically-discredited scientific hypothesis, but people not to all plugged in to general scientific knowledge will not know that. It’s not really fallacious on inspection.

we have published an article on breast cancer, health and accidents. Lifescape astrology is a new system.

we are requesting people to test this theory with their own data. In case anyone gets correlation of less than 80%, he can say so on our forums, and we will think of ways for compensating him for his time.

we are more interested in area of breast cancer, because ultimately it will help control the disease in cases where early detection is there.

[posted for entertainment value only -razib]

I saw an article today with Rick Santorum attacking Huntsman’s anti-science comments. It’s interesting when he says,

“It’s not anti-science. It’s an affirmation of what we view in the world. Which is, we see God.”

It’s a ridiculous comment that avoids the central issues Huntsman raised. But I think it highlights the phenomena at play. I think what happens is people recognize science is valuable but avoid the issue of what makes something scientific. Of course I bet Santorum is down lower on the wordsum score as it were. What’s interesting to me are more intelligent people who try and deal with it. I think you get into a battle between values (in the strict sense of the word) and reason. That’s no cognitive dissonance though – at least as I understand it. As you get people who understand more arguments one just can’t appeal to ignorance anymore which is why I find such people so fascinating. Some people leap to the “God of the gaps” line of reasoning. But if you look at strict ID proper rather than the Creationism that uses ID as a sign of respectability it really does accept most of scientific history and is really only a minor revision of evolution. It’s a ridiculous one in m y view but at least the people are rational and recognize they can’t discount most of the arguments. Creationists proper end up rejecting a lot out of ignorance or avoidance.

While I don’t know much about people who believe in astrology I suspect they really are more like creationists. (Astrology is sort of like a “socially acceptable” anti-science superstition for secularists – it’s just as ludicrous as Creationism if not more so but somehow manages to not have the negative connotation in polite society that Creationism does)

Surely the intelligent who believe (for whatever reason) in astrology would at least recognize it’s not science. (Although are there intelligent people who believe that young earth creationism is scientific?)

I’m open to being proven otherwise however. Does anyone have any evidence or compelling logic to back up Tony and Cathy’s view? (For that matter, does anyone think that Vincent in particular and April to a slightly lesser extent are making non-compelling arguments?)

As for S’wit, I’m not sure what Judaism has to do with the matter. Jews don’t stand out in this study to nearly the same extent as they stand out in their willingness (as medical professionals) to perform abortions or in their acceptance of adultery as not necessarily immoral yet throughout practically all of history people who believed they were practicing JudaISM considered both of those practices to be highly immoral. — Not to mention the fact that there are hundreds of tomes of sacred Jewish literature dedicated entirely to the study of astrology (thank God there’s always Maimonides to fall back on).

Even if there was some grain of truth to seasonal correlations with personality, the fact that Astrology tries to explain it using the alignment of celestial bodies makes it not scientific. There is a difference between “sort of scientific” and “sort of truthful”.

The plural of guessing is not evidence- the plural of guessing is folk wisdom. Do yall boneheads that see ‘a small grain of evidence’ in your folk wisdom see that you are not doing it right?
“I can see (i.e. I can imagine a possible world) were X leads to Y” is folk intuition. So is seeing the face of the man in the moon and thinking it is, well, a *man* the *moon* is a science fail because we are testing our perception of faces and not astrolology or astronomy. If my perception of the world changes when I read ‘My day as a Leo’ then the freaking process of reading and understanding is the subject for science. Y’all must be born under Cancer, the sign of most losers.

I remember the priest in my church lecturing the congregation on not reading horoscopes, since they weren’t Christian. That’s the only time I ever heard someone in a mainstream church even mention astrology, positively or negatively.

If you drill down, my guess that among those who believe astrology is scientific, there is a concept that something is scientific if smart people think about it a lot. I’ve met a fair share of astrologers who are very rigorous with their observations and hypothese within their rule set. Even the ones who aren’t that bright are very good at appearing that they have a lot of proof to back them up – this is one of the essential traits of anybody who makes a living at conning people (intentionally or not).

To make a really good case about levels of intelligence and education in relationship to beliefs about things like astrology, I think it would be necessary to really make sure that everybody understands the question. There’s an awful lot of people out there who probably can’t diagram out the scientific method – I have a feeling if they were shown this and then asked if astrology fit with this model, you’d get a different set of results.