Pseudoscience
Astrology: still false, after 2000 years
We’ve known that astrology is bunk for two millennia. Here are some reasons why
Wouldn’t it be nice if the configuration of astronomical objects determined our character and our fate? Wouldn’t that be both reassuring and, in a sense, flattering? I mean the cosmos decide who I am and what I do! How wonderful and ego boosting! Talk about deep connections between the human world and the universe at large!
Let’s aside that I bet the same people who find astrology attractive would recoil at the notion that they don’t have free will because they live in a deterministic universe — which is no different at all from what astrologers claim anyway. While our characters and lives are indeed determined — by the universal web of cause and effect — astrology is bunk. And we’ve known this for two millennia.
Marcus Tullius Cicero, the Roman advocate, statesman, and philosopher who lived in the first century BCE, wrote a scathing criticism of astrology as part of his book, On Divination, in which he harshly criticized the Stoics for believing in such nonsense.
One argument made by Cicero is that we have no reason to think that powerful phenomena that unfold near us, like thunderstorms, have any influence on our…
