The Observer's Astrologer counters Dawkins

[Larry Lovage]

Neil Spencer: http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,2146775,00.html

Having been previously unaware that one of the papers I took even had an astrology column, it's astounding the level of cant being demonstrated by this hokum-seller is mind-boggling.

Few things arouse the indignation of science's hard hats like non-conventional approaches to healing. Homeopathy and acupuncture are particularly repellent since they work through mechanisms unknown to the laws of physics. Homeopathy's supposed cures are, according to Dawkins, merely the result of the placebo effect. 'It's our own minds that cure the pain,' he concludes. How that explains why animals respond to homeopathy isn't confronted.
The placebo effect is real enough, as any GP knows, but common sense and a wealth of personal testimony attest that there are other processes at work in treatments like homeopathy. For scientism, however, personal experience is not admissible. Everything must be subject to randomised, controlled double-blind trials, just like medical drugs - 'drugs that work' as Dawkins insists. Indeed they do, but not all the time. The medical profession admits that the success of approved drugs can be as low as 60 per cent.

There are frauds, scamsters and incompetents in the mind/body/spirit arena, but the same is true of applied science. Its assumed halo turns downright grubby when one considers its graduates' willingness to put ethics aside for questionable industrial practices - dowsers or chanters don't devise ever deadlier land mines.

Apparently he's failed to notice that 99% of science is legitimate and useful, but 100% of astrologers and psychics are fraudsters and liars.

An old chestnut - the anti-rational impulses of famous scientists:

His view of science requires an acrobatic rewrite of its own history, and for the 'esoteric' interests of its heroes to be suppressed. Galileo was, after all, astrologer as well as astronomer. Likewise Johannes Kepler, who was preoccupied with Pythagorean mathematics and Platonic solids. Isaac Newton was fascinated by alchemy, as was Robert Boyle, father of chemistry.

As Isaac Asimov said, "With all due respect to these authentically great minds, I don't accept their authority on this point."

 

[arthwollipot]

So what is the rational explanation for why animals respond to homeopathy?

No, hang on, I'll start another thread for that.

 

[Big Les]

Not so much "counters" as "whines back at".

 

[asmodean]

So what is the rational explanation for why animals respond to homeopathy?

No, hang on, I'll start another thread for that.

Now I prolly take a really sarcastic response as genuine but what a heck.

The reason? The animal doesn't. The animals owner does.

 

[Rrose Selavy]

For those outside the UK, the Observer is (ironically) one of the more high brow Sunday newspapers - a sister of the daily Guardian - and generally respected. Somehow I couldn't see RD consulting Mystic Meg on the rigors of evidence and proof of astrology, entertaining though that might have been

Didn't make his answer any more convincing though.