How to Stop Believing

Since I'm taking a renewed interest in blogging, at least for time being, I was glancing at the searches which had brought people to my blog, where I found this entry: "how to stop believing in astrology".

At first, I laughed a bit. It seemed a silly thing to think about: stopping believing in something only supported by the weight of its own indolence and intellectual laziness - how hard could it be?

I thought further, though. As a child, I was fascinated by astrology, numerology, witchcraft, the "unexplained" and the "paranormal" - anything that added an extra dimension of mystery, excitement, and entertainment to my otherwise dull and quiet life. I was a shy child, and didn't make friends all that easily. Thinking that there was something mysterious about the world made it better for me. My favourite book to flip through, at my grandparents' house to which we were contractually obligated to travel each and every Sunday morning, and one of the few books in the house, was one about things just like that: the Bermuda Triangle, Sasquatch and the Yeti, the mysteries of Easter Island, UFOs, and the like. At the same time that I was learning science from programmes like Cosmos, Connections, and Life on Earth, I was learning - with what I blush to say must have been an equal and entirely uncritical zeal - the anti-science side too, from books like the one described, popular magazines, and programmes like "In Search Of..."

I was also raised in a religious home - that is to say, we went to the euphemistically-named "Sunday school", which apparently was an effort to put the mumbo jumbo that we were being fed on Sundays on par with the lessons learned during the school week. It was a mix of the Presbytery and Baptist, most of the time, although the divisions between the faiths - and the disconcerting differences in their liturgy - weren't made clear at the outset, but served to undermine both of their certainties afterwards. More importantly, though, was that this belief in seemingly - and as it turns out, genuinely - irrational things dovetailed nicely. If you could believe in resurrected carpenters who made the wine last all day and told a man with a bit of a limp to stop moaning and go for a walk, then surely you could also believe in aliens and Atlantis, right?

Pouring over the newspaper decoding the horoscope (this in the days when newspapers printed a sequence of numbers under each sign, and you had to decypher it from the list of numbered words), trying earnestly and fruitlessly to move things with my mind and looking for patterns in the number of letters in the names of people: these things, for a while, were how I thought of the world, how I imagined that it must really work, if only I could figure out how. I was young. I was stupid. And thanks to that religious thinking template, I was fully able to believe that some, if not all of it, must have been true.

What stopped me reading horoscopes, subconsciously counting the letters in people's names, trying to move the salt cellar with my mind, and believing in the piscine creeds, then?

One simple thing: Evidence.

There are several kinds of evidence we need to address here: anecdotal, or personal evidence, and controlled, verifiable evidence. For example, in the former category might be:

"I prayed to my god to send me a taxi because I was in a hurry when my car broke down near the airport, and one appeared almost immediately. Prayer works!

Yet, on the other hand, we can look at things this way:

"I needed to find a taxi when my car broke down near the airport, to finish my trip there. Fortunately, taxis are a bit thick on the ground... it being an airport and all. Statistics work!

As you can see, there's little difference in the sequence of events. It's the interpretation that makes the difference. And the fact remains that if you were one hundred miles from the airport, the stories might go a bit differently. On the one hand, we could statistically predict the likelihood of finding a taxi within a given radius of a major air travel terminal within a given time. On the other, we could just throw thinking to the wind and pray, or wish upon a star, or ask Sleepless, Deathless Chthulu to send us his dark taxi minions. But the result doesn't necessarily correlate with the data provided. At least, not in one anecdotal instance. Give me a thousand such, and I can start to draw you a pattern. That's how data collection works, at least, in an abstract way.

But people who believe in prayer, like people who believe in astrology, aren't really interested in building up a library of data, of facts. Wooly thinking is far more comfortable next to the skin, and who wouldn't like to think that there's some all-powerful sky fairy with my best interests at heart, protecting me, taking a profound and personal interest in me and keeping me from harm always, not to mention providing me with taxis on demand? To be fair, if he were really acting in my interest, he'd pay for them as well... which of course he, she, or it can't, because he, she, or it is a Bronze Age fabrication, a story to make children go to bed on time and to ensure the hegemony of a few over the rabble of the many.

I digress. It's simple to build up a case for why astrology is so much vagueness and pflummery. In fact, Phil Plait, among others, did it a long time ago, and there's an entry in Robert T. Carroll's excellent Skeptic's Dictionary, but you hardly need to go that far. Just ask two "astrologers" to make a simple prediction, from the same unbiased dataset. Or ask three, or five, or ten. No matter what the variable, you'll get that many different answers. In other words, astrology can make predictions, but the predictions differ each time, even though they will be based upon the same facts.

In science, when a prediction is made, it's made in accordance with a theory. Gravitational theory gives us the mathematics (with certain modifications for relativity) to put global positioning satellites into orbit so that I can find a really cool cache with nothing more than my ability to read a handheld GPS; a divining rod and knowing that Saturn was in the seventh house when you were born isn't going to help you there. Atomic theory explains what goes on in a nuclear reactor and why it must be so closely watched over, in a way that "magic potion" doesn't quite seem to cover. And evolutionary theory predicts that in certain strata, in certain places in the fossil record, we should find certain kinds of fossils, like Tiktaalik, which were there as predicted. The best that a creation myth can do, by comparison, is to just shrug and say "magic man done it, me old son". Furthermore, if the theory isn't borne out, then it is the theory that must be modified, rather than have itself healed by the power of "special pleading". Confront someone who believes something flatly contradicted by reality with that reality, and you'll immediately recognise special pleading. It is the logical equivalent of a puppy dog-eyed, quivering-lipped look, accompanied by an almost imperceptible sob.

So how do you stop believing? Look around. Really and objectively look at those things that you believe without any evidence, or thought, or consideration. Then ask yourself: why? What evidence would I need to see, to make me stop believing that? And look for that evidence. Take notes, turn off the telly, and try to think. We can all do it, if we would only try.

And that, in overlong form, is how I would suggest that one stop believing in astrology. Job done.