Astrology Refuted: They Should Have Seen It Coming
A comedian once showed a newspaper to his audience. The headline
read, "1-800 Astrology Business Goes Under: They Should Have
Seen It Coming." Everyone laughed, including me. We chuckled at
the irony of a real contradiction here. If such a business could
provide the service they claim, then its owners should have
succeeded where other businesses failed. In fact, if they really
knew the future, they likely wouldn't bother with this business
at all. They would simply raid the stock market with a perfect
investing record. We all somewhat instinctively know this, even
those of us who have never had the occasion to sit and think it
through carefully.
But this pseudo-science has another problem that concerns us.
It's adherents who create the garden-variety horoscope columns
(found in most any newspaper) spotlight a basic contradiction.
On the one hand, they pretend to tell your future based upon the
timing of your birth and the alignment of the stars and/ or
planets. Philosophers have called this assumption "astral
determinism."
This means simply that the stars and planets determine your
future, hence the phrase, "written in the stars." On the other
hand, however, when the predictors finish telling just what will
befall you, they move onto the next part of the column. They
offer advice. But this advice you may take or leave, as though
you have a free choice to make, the outcome of which no star
determines.
So they assume astral determinism when predicting, and then
assume its opposite when advising. One simply cannot have it
both ways. The only way to resolve this contradiction derives
from saying that the heavenlies determine SOME things, but not
others. This avoids contradictory impulses, however, at the cost
of engaging a purely arbitrary (pick and choose whichever you
like) approach to what stars do and do not determine about your
life. And yet their charts promise a principled (non-arbitrary)
way to know the future. So this option makes no logical headway
either.
Either way then, assumptions necessary to the trade of
star-traffickers show themselves bogus. The whole thing turns
out a useless mirage. Astral determinism thus represents a
phoney idea, and we can show this with a little logical rigor.
Finally then, we wish to add logical insult to mystical injury
by noting that our refutation of astral determinism posits a
fairly clear and obvious problem for their trade. And like the
bug who never quite manages to avoid the fast-approaching
windshield -- they should have seen it coming.