Thursday, November 30, 2006
Scientists' double standard
Posted by Harold Henderson on 11.30.06 at 08:13 AM
"I don't believe in life after death," Natalie Angier wrote in the American Scholar two years ago, "but I'd like to believe in life before death. I'd like to think that one of these days we'll leave superstition and delusional thinking and Jerry Falwell behind. Scientists would like that, too. But for now, they like their grants even more."
Angier's eloquent plaint is getting a second life on the Web thanks to Edge magazine. Her prize examples revealing how scientists malign some superstitions more than others were drawn from two installments of Cornell University's "Ask an Astronomer" online feature.
On religion: "Modern science leaves plenty of room for the existence of God and that there are plenty of places where people who do believe in God can fit their beliefs in the scientific framework without creating any contradictions."
On astrology: "Astronomers do not believe in astrology. It is considered to be a ludicrous scam. There is no evidence that it works, and plenty of evidence to the contrary. There is also no mechanism by which distant planets could possibly influence personalities."
Logically, of course, it's equally possible to find hidey-holes in the currently known universe for astrology, suitably interpreted. But the stars haven't been aligned to get those believers' hands on NSF funding.
Comments (3)
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not that i'm pushing the astrological option, mind you, but angier's uninflected polemic against it seems to me a way bit glib * for many years through the 80s, french statistician michel gauquelin (THE COSMIC CLOCKS) researched possible connections (admittedly coincidental, which wouldn't make them counterfactual) between astrological "birth" sign and seasonal variations in climate(since, e.g., all arians are born necessarily in spring and all saggitarians in early winter ... though one might consider that, with all the formative prenatal downtime from, let's say, the point of conception on, those saggitarian newborns would actually be arians nine months in arrears!) * arguably then, we might find a significant correlation between, e.g., wintertime births and developing personality (more melancholy individuals or whatever--under the "sign of saturn," so to speak) for what seems to me a fairly decent primer on this stuff i'd recommend http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Gauquelin
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The "uninflected polemic" was a Cornell astronomer's, not Angier's. Sorry for any unclarity. The point (for me anyway) is that what's sauce for the religious goose is sauce for the astrological gander, not what the exact sauce should be.
Being an astrologer, it would be nice to get some funds to see if what I practice can be scientifically verified. After all we teach string theory in universities, a phenomenon that hasn't exactly been observed, but has more credibility attached to it than the universally experienced Saturn Return. (How did you feel about life at around 28-29 years of age? I used to call it the "Going Thirty Crazies", until I studied astrology some years later.)
