Sir, - Richard Dawkins's irrational anti astrology tirade (The Irish Times, January 20th) does a tremendous disservice to science. The fact that he is the holder of the Chair of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford is particularly worrying.
Most scientists actually study the topics that they may eventually come to judge dismissively. Speaking as both a one time research scientist and a currently active professional astrologer, it is clear from the article that Dawkins made no effort whatsoever to uncover the true nature of astrology. Engaging in a pulpit science propaganda exercise does nothing to promote science as an objective, ideologically neutral and value free exercise in the rational pursuit of truth. His fundamentalism, masquerading under the well worn cloak of scientific infallibility, should make all true scientists feel very uncomfortable.
I won't waste time attempting to refute his extraordinarily misinformed and, at this stage, cliched and spurious arguments chosen to debunk astrology. It's been done countless times before, and yet astronomers and scientists seem to be hell bent on maintaining a wilful ignorance of astrology's actual reality. There are all sorts of reasons for this. The emergence of science out of the monotheistic traditions of Christianity, Islam and Judaism to its current status as a dominant absolutist belief system does not allow it to sit easily next to any other way of describing or contemplating our subjective experience of reality.
Science, with its emphasis on quantitative prediction, sees astrology as a rival predictive system, even though astrological prediction is qualitative in nature and concerned with meaning. In a classic example of poacher turned gamekeeper science reacts rabidly to any mention of astrology reminding them as it does of science's own bastard lineage. Science did not start with Newton and Descartes. The debt she owes to astrologers is incalculable. Were Galileo, Copernicus and Kepler (all practicing astrologers) stupid and fraudulent charlatans?
Dawkins's suggestion that astrology debauches science for profit is laughable talk about the pot calling the kettle black What about the pharmaceutical companies and the military arms industry, which between them fund a very large percentage of scientific research? And when it comes to "aesthetic affronts", science manages to stretch the concept to include moral repugnance. Next to a mouse running around with a human ear grown on its back, astrology becomes a paragon of beauty.
Dawkins seemingly wants the likes of me jailed for profiteering and fraud. Apart from the fact that astrology works, I'm no fraud and I'm entitled to make a living from my profession. Rubbing out astrologers will do nothing to alleviate the growing tensions for fundamentalist scientists, whose reductionist models are under huge pressure from the rapidly developing fields of complexity theory and non linear science.
There is a growing paranoia in the scientific establishment - it has identified an anti science movement in society which needs to be counteracted. See, for example, the editorial in Nature of March 17th 1994, entitled:
"Science versus anti Science", which also identifies astrology, along with religious beliefs of all kinds, as the "enemy of truth". Astrologers will not become scapegoats as science moves through its own crisis of faith and philosophical reformation in the next few decades. Yours, etc.. The Liffey Arts Research Centre, Victoria Bridge, Naas, Co Kildare.