ONE HUNDRED and eighty-six leading scientists, including eighteen Nobel Prize winners, came out with a statement recently in which they claim there is no scientific evidence that the stars have anything to do with one's personality or fortune. The statement, along with two lengthy articles that further decry astrology as magic, appears in the September/October issue of The Humanist, published by the American Humanist Association and the American Ethical Union. The magazine issue was sent free to newspaper editors throughout the country, in the hope that the dissenting opinion would be re printed as a means to offset public gullibility in horoscope charts published in the newspapers.
Until I read the statement and the accompanying articles in The Humanist, it never occurred to me that the practice of astrology was more than a harmless parlor game, hardly a public hazard calling for 186 leading scientists to speak out. There's more to the "art," of course, than reading your morning newspaper to discover whether this is the day to act aggressively or to sit in the shade. My neighbor, for example, is an amateur "horoscope-ologist" of some note, and her mother is a professional in New York City who makes an ample living charting the astrological houses of some of that city's more renowned. My neighbor is dead serious about astrology. She looks upon it as her personal religion.
She says it works, too. Once, for example, her husband contemplated a move to Buffalo. But, lo, the charts warned against the move. Heedless, the move was made anyway. In short order, disaster befell the family. Then another move was planned, this time to Chicago. Now the charts produced favorable signs. Sure enough, everything went well there. Coincidence? Don't say that to my neighbor, not if you don't want to hear about a dozen or two more situations in which the charts were on course. But, then, my neighbor, as other astrological enthusiasts, tends to remember where the charts worked and forget where they didn't.
Content to live and let live where my neighbor and her horoscope are concerned, I have remained a cautious agnostic on the subject. Neither knowing very much about the "art," nor caring very much, I figure if Bea wants to believe the stars can tell her future, let her do so. It has seemed harmless enough.
But now come the 186 leading scientists. ("Leading" is their word, not mine.) "Those who wish to believe in astrology should realize that there is no scientific foundation for its tenets," they say. "It is simply a mistake to imagine that the forces exerted by stars and planets at the moment of birth can in any way shape our futures. Neither is it true that the position of distant heavenly bodies make certain days or periods more favorable to particular kinds of action, or that the sign under which one was born determines one's compatibility or incompatibility with other people."
They say more. "We are especially disturbed by the continued uncritical dissemination of astrological charts, forecasts, and horoscopes by the media and by otherwise reputable newspapers, magazines, and book publishers. This can only contribute to the growth of irrationalism and obscurantism. We believe that the time has come to challenge directly and forcefully the pretentious claims of astrological charlatans."
In short, astrology is nonsense. Worse, it allows for the interplay of magic on the human psyche. And that's the hazard. It is not the stars that affect personality but the medium of astrology itself. Take a horoscope reading seriously and pretty soon your life turns out the way the charts indicate because of their psychological power of suggestion.
I carry no brief for astrology, but a bone-marrow theological instinct within me leans toward sympathy. Reading the pages of The Humanist, it is easy to make a few mental shifts in the text, substituting "theology" for "astrology" and "faith" for "magic," for instance. Would the Christian faith, I wonder, suffer any less in the hands of these scientists than astrology? I think not.
Faith left in the hands of scientific reason, pure or impure, is quickly made to become irrationality and obscurantism, or else a form of magic that can powerfully influence personality. Scientists, any of the aforementioned 186, spotting Christians at prayer, could be expected to make no less a severe judgment against this practice than they hurled at believers in astrology. Particularly if prayer is employed as a key to the storehouse of God's blessings or as a mechanism to get God to cooperate with the human will. When that hap pens, the distinction between astrology and Christian belief visibly narrows.
While we may agree with the scientists who claim that "there is not the slightest ground for believing that social events can be foretold by divinations of the stars," it is well to remember that from that same scientific viewpoint the Christian faith is also untenable. Thus at heart we are linked with these "charlatans," having found it necessary to go beyond the flat-world view of the scientific rationalist to the supernatural and transcendent. The Christian, convinced of the reality of God, heaven, eternal life, and the revelation of the Divine Word in the person of Jesus Christ, is no less vulnerable to the scientific assault than is the believer in astrology.
If that is so, then it behooves the Christian not to rejoice too eagerly with the scientific triumph over the astrologers. Indeed, if science is not the all-knowing, all-seeing discipline it some times claims to be, there may not have been a triumph in the first place. In the end, then, it is not science that is needed to declare astrology a form of magical hokum, but the defenders of the Christian faith themselves. At stake is the issue of faith, authentic faith versus the phony.
Astrology is no mere fad. People turn to it for a security they have not other wise found. Surely the Christian can offer a better alternative than the belief that our fate is somehow determined by the heavenly bodies.
The question is whether there are in this atheological, fuzzy-thinking time in Christian history any believers left to make the challenge.
