The Enemies of Reason: Richard Dawkins on Astrology
November 14th, 2007 by MarkI’ve long been a fan of Richard Dawkins’ books. I read the Selfish Gene as a teenager and found it absolutely fascinating. Not only was that book the foundation of sociobiology, but it also coined the term “meme”. Little did I know that a few years later, millions of people would be tossing the word around, with the original meaning a bit muddled but still intact.
In the last couple of years, Dawkins has been on a crusade against what he calls “The Enemies of Reason”. After traveling around the world and debating with numerous religious leaders (including Pastor Ted Haggard before he was caught with the gay prostitute/meth seller). In his new video, rather than continuing the assault against traditional religions, he’s after Astrology, Homeopathy, and a variety of other “New Age” beliefs.
I’m cheering him all the way on this one, and after spending years living in Taiwan it’s a godsend, pardon the term. It really is too bad there isn’t a Chinese speaker like Dawkins. The level of superstitious belief here, particularly in astrology is just mind-boggling. I must have met hundreds of Chinese who really wanted me to tell them my birth date so they could figure out what my sign was and pigeon-hole me.
The part on astrology starts at five minutes and thirty-seven seconds.
November 15th, 2007 at 8:09 am
i watched the video. the thing that stuck with me was how even when confronted with evidence, the dousers preferred their delusions. working on a local political campaign just over i ran into all kinds of irrationality. usually people avoid confrontation face to face and only seem to talk about controversial subjects with others who agree with them. but during this campaign i was trying to understand people’s views even when i disagreed with them. one woman told me many people would not vote for the democrats for town committee because they personally didn’t like the head of the local democratic club. i said that i didn’t count him as a good friend, but that i cooperated with him on issues we both believed in, and that not to do so just because he ‘rubbed you the wrong way’ was illogical. she retorted: whose logical? you’re in the minority. she didn’t want to join me either. the more i came into contact with people like this the more i had deja vu about being in taiwan. only i used to think it was just crazy chinese culture, where now i’m more inclined to believe that, western tradition not withstanding, it’s crazy human nature.
November 16th, 2007 at 3:30 am
I completely agree with you, V. It’s human nature and we all suffer from it in one way or another. Sometimes videos like this make me wish I’d devoted my life to science as Dawkins has.
November 16th, 2007 at 5:54 am
it’s not too late and your age.
November 16th, 2007 at 6:00 pm
I love how the self-righteous preacher fell from grace. That same guy was ranting against homosexuality in “jesus camp”
November 16th, 2007 at 11:26 pm
I suppose I run the risk of branding myself “irrational” but here we go anyway:
Scientifically speaking, it seems fairly certain that there is some force or another holding the solar system together. There is an invisible set of forces which keep the planets revolving in more or less fixed orbits around the sun. The choices are:
1. These forces are able to affect us in some ways.
1(a). The ways these forces affect us are unknowable.
1(b). It is possible to investigate the ways these forces affect us.
2. These forces are unable to affect us in any way.
2(a). Ridicule everyone who disagrees.
2(b). Maintain skepticism but remain open to all possibilities.
I personally feel like there isn’t enough evidence to prove or disprove either of these beliefs, but this guy Dawkins is going with approach 2(a), which upon review, does not seem the most inquisitive or “rational”. Also, why the heavy dependence on dramatic music? Could it be that he is appealing to things other than “reason” in his audience (i.e. tugging on heart strings)? His own “experiments” were far from scientific, and if he thinks gazing off into billions of stars at night is such a profound way of dealing with existence, he’s just putting his romanticism on stage front and center.
November 17th, 2007 at 2:44 am
Matt, how would you suggest improving his experiments? I don’t mean that as a rhetorical question. Obviously they were small and low-budget, but both the one for the dousers and the astrology one were double-blind and seemed reasonably well designed to me.
Also, why wouldn’t you put Dawkins in the 1(b) camp? He’s not a physicist, but I’m sure he’s all for the investigation and study of gravity.
November 17th, 2007 at 4:25 am
I stopped watching after the astrology bit so i don’t know about his other experiments… but as for that one where he took a bunch of random people with different astrological signs and then read them all a single horoscope, what exactly does that “prove” and with what degree of accuracy? How much could one extrapolate from that? As for designing an experiment, I have no experience with such things but there are obviously tons of practical difficulties, including the following:
1. Defining terms: what is astrology? does it make claims to being absolute? what is belief in astrology? what is disbelief in astrology? does astrology have any existence outside the realm of “belief”? what is astrological accuracy?
2. In what sense could a scientific study of astrology be “objective” since it is so often obviously planted in the realm of subjective belief?
3. Most people who would potentially be doing experiments and also most who would potentially be the subjects of experiments have subjective understandings of the object being tested that would necessarily contribute to the experiment’s results. In both respects this would take away from anything approaching “objectivity.”
4. Largely one would be subjecting people’s emotions and feelings to scientific study–i.e., does this horoscope apply to you or not? This is flimsy data.
5. Another problem is that one must be careful about taking a general category like “astrology” and trivializing it to one astrologist’s column as it applies to 12 people off the street. The phenomenon is obviously much larger than that, and if one were to approach it in a style similar to Dawkins, one would first need to analyze whether or not there were similarities among horoscopes written by a larger set of astrologists at any given time. Of course this would also be a subjective undertaking.
6. Whatever the case, a rigorous scientist would have to understand astrological methods, assuming they exist (i.e. how they go about creating horoscopes–do they all do it the same way, what factors might contribute to different results on their own part, etc.) in order to account for possible differences between different astrologers’ own results. The desire to “prove” or “disprove” is also problematic in these last two. There is a general interpretive problem here–how absolute and singular is the meaning of any given data?
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I realize all this makes me look like someone trying to “defend” astrology, but that’s really not the case at all. What I am trying to defend more is the power of subjective imagination, which “science” often wants to stamp out, as if it had nothing to do with life and rejuvenation.
If I was a scientist and I really was interested in the phenomena, I would try to take the focus as much away from individual subjectivity as possible, and instead turn to something like neurobiology, where science perhaps has more valid claims to objective measurement. For example, how might things like gravitational forces/fields between planets, moons and the sun affect people physiologically, subatomically, neurologically, whatever. But of course first one would have to identify to a way to measure those forces–are they linear, spacial? do they move, change direction? etc. From the perspective of science, that’s probably all in the land of poppycock today.
As for putting Dawkins in 1(b), I would only put him there superficially. He’s called his show “The Enemies of Reason,” which sounds sort of fascist, and he uses emotional music to drive home points which he considers “rational.” He’s making big bucks off all this so it probably makes no difference to him. He likes the “gravitas” that science brings, but really he’s claiming ground that hasn’t been secured yet. In other words, the “investigation” has already been finished and there’s nothing more to be said.
November 17th, 2007 at 6:03 am
you are definiely an aries
November 17th, 2007 at 6:04 am
definitely
November 17th, 2007 at 7:26 am
haha, nice try. i’m a scorpio…
November 17th, 2007 at 8:26 pm
i was just testing you
November 18th, 2007 at 4:00 pm
“It really is too bad there isn’t a Chinese speaker like Dawkins. The level of superstitious belief here, particularly in astrology is just mind-boggling.”
Amen to that, if you’ll excuse the pun! Unfortunately, a Chinese Dawkins would probably have about as much success as someone trying to explain secular humanism in the U.S. Bible Belt.
November 19th, 2007 at 5:53 am
People would tell him he 想s太多.
November 21st, 2007 at 11:50 am
[...] Professor Robert Harrist teaches Art History at Columbia. In the video below, he discusses an interesting relationship involving new scientific discoveries associated with the brain and some recent trends in contemporary Chinese art. It’s nice to see that the humanities and the sciences can have some common food for thought! [...]
February 7th, 2009 at 3:50 am
Matt wrote:
That force is called gravity.
April 29th, 2009 at 3:22 pm
If my horoscope is really bad, I don’t even leave the house sometimes.