Terence Hines - Pseudoscience and the Paranormal

One result of the horrors of repressed memory therapy and the realization that much of what passes as “psychotherapy” is nothing other than pseudoscientific nonsense has been a number of book-length critiques of psychotherapy. Among the best are Campbell’s Beware the Talking Cure (1994), Dineen’s Manufacturing Victims : What the Psychology Industry Is Doing to People (1998), Pope’s Psychology Astray (1997), and Singer and Lalich’s Crazy Therapies (1996).

Ancient people must have learned well before the dawn of recorded history that observations of the stars and planets could predict the coming of the seasons, when to plant crops, when certain animals would give birth, and numerous other events vital to their survival. It seemed reasonable, then, that the positions of the heavenly bodies could predict, or even influence, human behavior. Thus, astrology, the oldest pseudoscience, was born.

Astrology’s history goes back more than four thousand years and testifies to people’s unending fascination with the stars and attempts to predict, the future. The first written records of astrology come from Mesopotamia, located between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in the area that is now Iraq and Syria (Culver and Ianna 1984). The early astrology of the Mesopotamians was an “open” astrology and was much simpler than later astrology. Ancient people saw omens in everything, not just the stars. Almost anything that happened could be interpreted as an omen of something that was going to take place in the future. Examples of astrological omens from this period include:

When Mars approaches the star Shu.gi there will be uprising in Amurru and hostility; one will kill another.

When Venus stands high, there will be pleasure of copulation.

Nonastrological omens are of essentially the same character and are equally unlikely to have been based on empirical study, as the following examples indicate:

If a woman gives birth to a pig, a woman will seize the throne.

If a woman gives birth to an elephant, the land will be laid to waste.

If a ewe gives birth to a lion and it has two horns on the left, an enemy will take your fortress.

If a man goes on an errand and a falcon passes from his right to his left, he will achieve his goal.

The sources for these omens are Van der Waerden (1974) and Leichty (1975), both cited in Culver and Ianna.

The horoscope is a much more recent development in astrology; the earliest known example dates from April 29, 410 B.C.E. (Culver and Ianna 1984).

Modern astrologers claim their “science” is not based on magical associations, but the history of astrology shows this to be false. Astrology flourished in ancient Greece, where the magical influence is clear. The Greeks deified the planets, and each of their gods had certain characteristics. For example, Aphrodite (Venus) was the goddess of love and beauty, so the planet Venus was assumed to magically make one sensitive, emotional, and appreciative of beauty (Jerome 1977). Similarly, Hermes (Mercury) was the messenger of the gods and was said to be “shrewd, swift, unpredictable” (p. 71) because the actual planet was hard to see and moved rapidly. By purely magical association, therefore, the planet Mercury was said to make someone difficult to predict, deceitful, and yet skillful. These associations were never based on empirical research, simply on ancient magical associations. They still form the basis for modern astrological predictions.

Even the grouping of stars into the constellations that make up the twelve signs of the zodiac is arbitrary. The stars are grouped together not because they are actually close together in space but because they appear to be close together when seen from Earth. Further, different cultures group the stars in different ways and see different constellations in the sky. The only way these apparent groupings of stars called the constellations could have any special influence over human beings is through some unspecified sort of magic.

Ptolemy, the great astronomer and astrologer who lived in the second century C.E., also based his astrology on magical associations between the stars and planets and human behavior (Thorndike 1923). During the Middle Ages in Europe, great emphasis was placed on the authority of previous writers. Ptolemy was considered to be the greatest astrologer of the ancient world, so his writings on astrology were accepted and passed down in this way (Thomdike 1923, vol. 1). Thus, modern astrologers’ claims that their “science” is based on thousands of years of experimental and empirical observation are simply untrue; in fact, modern astrology rests largely on Ptolemy’s writings.

Certainly, views about the exact nature of the hypothesized influences of specific stars and planets on human behavior have changed over the centuries, and differences of opinion did and do exist among astrologers. Speaking of the Renaissance period, Shumaker (1972) states: “There has never, perhaps, been a time when conflicting opinions [about how astrology should be practiced] were not held and practices were not being modified. If at first glance such tinkering might be thought to imply constant experimental rectification, no one who has read much [medieval or Renaissance] astrological literature is likely to believe this was the cause of the alterations” (p. 11). Shumaker has found no experimental studies of astrology. Instead, astrology was justified by appeal “regularly to authorities… or to abstract reason” (p. 11). It is only in the twentieth century that statistical tests of astrological predictions have been attempted. These are reviewed later in this chapter.

Astrologers are fond of claiming that their craft is a science and that astronomy is merely an offshoot of astrology. As seen from the above, however, the basic structure of astrological hypotheses has hardly changed at all over the last twenty-five hundred years. Greek astrologers believed, based on magical associations, that someone born under the influence of the planet Venus would love beauty and be a sensitive person. This type of lore, passed down through generations, is still accepted by modem astrologers, in spite of the fact that in the four thousand-year history of astrology, no astrologer has ever tried to see if the hypothesized relationships between heavenly bodies and human behavior really exist. Astrologers have never conducted research to support their claims. In chapter 1 it was pointed out that one of the chief characteristics of a pseudoscience is a refusal to change in the light of new evidence. Knowledge of astronomy and astrophysics has changed immensely since the Greeks looked up at the stars and saw their gods there. In spite of this, astrology has not changed at all—it is a static, stale pseudoscience.

On those few occasions when astrologers have made attempts to change astrological practice and theory, the nature of the attempts further reveals the pseudoscientific nature of astrology. In 1970, for example, astrologer Steven Schmidt argued that there are really fourteen signs of the zodiac, not twelve. According to Schmidt, the constellations Cetus and Ophiuchus should be added to the familiar set of twelve. From a purely astronomical point of view, there is much to recommend this change. The Sun does, in fact, pass through these two constellations in addition to the signs of the zodiac. Schmidt’s problem was to determine the character traits associated with these two “new” signs of the zodiac. Nowhere in his book does he present any data or suggest an adequate method of discovering what these traits might be. Rather, he simply “collected people” and “examined their character traits” (Schmidt 1970, p. 18). The people he examined were hardly a representative or random sample, since they included movie stars, past presidents (dead and alive), famous politicians, and so forth. The method used is utterly worthless scientifically.