Astrology is perhaps the "queen" of pseudoscientific theories. Despite its obvious contradictions and its scientific refutation by numerous experiments and studies, it has continued to survive through the centuries, likely due to humanity’s timeless desire to know what the future holds, in order to quell its fears of the unknown. This predisposition of his intensifies during times of crisis and uncertainty, such as the present era, when rationalism and the scientific method —which humanity has attained through millennia of intellectual inquiry and exhaustive study— —are being called into question, giving way to approaches to reality rooted in metaphysics, parapsychology, and conspiracy theories.
Modern astrology, therefore, in its effort to gain credibility, draws on scientific terminology and certain scientific data, without, however, being subject to the rigors of scientific methodology and the exhaustive verification process that is the hallmark of modern science. Whenever experiments have been conducted—some of which involved astrologers, such as the one designed in 1985 by Sean Carlson, a professor of physics at the University of California, with the full cooperation of 28 renowned astrologers from the U.S. and Europe, utilizing the rigorous statistical methodology used to verify the effectiveness of medications. The results, published in the most prestigious international scientific journal, Nature, did not confirm the astrologers' expectations; on the contrary. Many similar experiments have been conducted (anyone interested should refer to the book “Pseudosciences and Conspiracy Theories”: "A Guide to Navigation" (published by the University of Crete Press—2023), and all have concluded that astrological predictions are no different from those based on chance.
In the fluid era of late modernity and the rule of anythinggoes, the need to expose pseudoscientific approaches and views does not stem from some obsessive inclination of science or from some philosophical quest, but is of fundamental value for everyday social and political activity, the formation of personal and collective positions, as well as for decision-making processes, which, according to Lakatos, must be based on rationality and critical scientific knowledge.
However, when rationality and the sequence of cause and effect—that is, the very foundation of logic upon which we can move forward through dialogue and a coherent plan as a society—are attacked, democracy itself is undermined, since a people, dominated by a distorted perception of reality, by conspiracy theories about history and nature, and lacking a solid epistemological foundation upon which it can, through dialogue, arrive at acceptable political plans, is easily led and manipulated. And we've been experiencing this more and more often in recent years.