Astrology and Scientific Method - Essay Example

I believe that the idea that celestial bodies and their positions might influence at the time of birth is patently ridiculous – especially because they are relative to so many other things (the way the earth is rotating, where the earth is on its path around the sun, etcetera). The time of year someone is born might, however, have some limited impact on how they develop and personality traits they have. It could be that babies are very sensitive to certain types of things happening to them, and their surroundings at different at very young ages could have an impact on how they develop.

For instance, in much of the world winter months are much colder and have much less daylight than Summer months, so it could be that babies who are first learning to walk and experience the world in June, when they can go outside and experience a great deal of sunlight, open spaces and so on, might generally have a different makeup from babies who are at that stage of their development in December, when they have little daylight and no open spaces. This could lead to their being a general difference in character between people born in December and those born in June, but would obviously be heavily related to how fast someone develops, the climate they live in and so on.

And so far, there is very little reason to suspect this is true. The scientific method is one of the most important ways of understanding the world that humans have. Its basic idea is that you create a hypothesis, for instance, objects with mass attract each other. Then you perform experiments, and see if the results match or do not match your hypothesis. Using that example, if you drop a ball and it falls, it confirms the hypothesis, but if it does not then it denies it. One of the most important things about the scientific process it that any rule must be true one hundred percent of the time – if a ball ever just hovers in the air when dropped, one would have to re-think gravity.

Things must also be repeatable – another person must be able to conduct the same experiment and get the same result. Astrology fails these tests in many ways – firstly, no astrologer would ever tell you that their horoscopes are true for every single person born under that sign every time a horoscope is published. Furthermore, astrology is not based on observation of things that occur in the real world, nor does it use experiments to see if its finding are accurate. In light of everything I have learned about astrology, I would say that the line from “Julius Caesar” is true – our actions, temperaments and so on are definitely not controlled by the stars at our time of birth, but are under our own control.

Obviously there are things outside of our control that affect our lives, but I seriously doubt that the stars are some of them.