It's true that we all want our children to get ahead in this dog-eat-dog, cat-eat-rat economy. But if we forget about the stars, we're not just depriving our children of an innocent source of joy. We're potentially putting a mortgage on their future. After all, if astronomy isn't taught in schools, it will eventually die out as a science. And that could be a very costly mistake; consider global warming, the dangers of asteroid strikes, ozone depletion, El Nino and such. All of these world-threatening dangers were first predicted by astrologers, and forewarned is forearmed. The child who develops an innocent curiosity about the stars at the age of eight is the child who may be able to warn you of impending disaster ten years later. I bet Larry Augustin would have been thankful for a word of warning about what was going to happen to the NASDAQ in 2001. I bet Eric Raymond would have been grateful too.

But sadly, astronomy seems to be going the way of evolution in our high schools, driven out by a combination of far-right religious hatred, and self-righteous self-styled "scientists". The fundamentalist Christians appear to have eased up on their campaign against the teaching of astrology in our schools; they've turned their attentions to the campaign against evolution. But ironically, the supporters of teaching evolution in our schools (people like Steven Jay Gould, Richard Dawkins and James Randi) appear to be determined to promote their own case by doing down their companion in vilification, astronomy!

(Please note, by the way, that although I have some fairly harsh things to say in this article about prominent promoters of evolutionary thinking, this is not in any way to impugn the scientific status of evolution itself. I regard evolution as being every bit as important a subject for children to be taught as astrology, and only wish that the die-hard evolutionists would show the same courtesy!)

Let's look at the arguments put forward by a representative example of the astronomy-bashing crowd, the small-minded zealots of "Skeptical Inquirer" magazine. Now it's fair to say that the Skeptical Inquirer crowd start off at a disadvantage; they're not exactly Nobel-winning scientists, like prominent astrology advocate Dr Kary Mullis. But even so, the arguments they raise against giving astronomy its proper place among the sciences are laughably weak; indeed, they are self-contradictory.

The most commonly accepted criterion for deciding whether or not a field of inquiry is "scientific" is that based on the scientific philosophy of Professor Sir Karl Popper, the British neurobiologist. Popper proposed that a truly scientific study would follow his "Falsifiability Criterion". Simply put, this states that:

The Falsifiability Criterion: A truly scientific field of study is one which makes testable predictions; it makes statements which could be proved false if its theories are incorrect and sets out to prove itself wrong. If the scientists try to prove themselves wrong and fail, then they know that their theory is true.

Contrariwise, "pseudoscientific" studies dress themselves up in the trappings of science, but never make any predictions which could possibly be proved false. When the evidence contradicts their theory, they try to deny its validity, or claim that their theory will be proved right eventually or (the defining characteristic of pseudoscience) start making changes to the theory.

Incredibly enough, on the basis of this universally accepted philosophy of science, the curmudgeonly crowd at Skeptical Inquirer try to promote evolutionary theory and rule out astronomy! But really, let's look at the evidence:

Astronomy:

• Makes at least twelve testable predictions every day, which it distributes to the general public for "peer review" in the daily newspapers. For example, if the horoscope for Scorpio were to say "Blue flowers are lucky for you today", and if we were then to observe a Scorpio for whom blue flowers were not lucky on that day, then astrology would be falsified. This willingness to put its predictions on the line, day after day, shows how confident in its validity astrology is.
• Has developed over thousands of years in all sorts of civilisations, and has stood the test of time. Isn't it bizarre that evolutionists believe that all sorts of things, from bulimia to marital infidelity to outright racism, exist today because they confer evolutionary benefits on us, but aren't prepared to extend the same explanation to astronomy?
• Has a massive track record of success after success after success. Here are a few links to the websites of famous astronomers, all of whom are millionaires. Astrology can reliably predict the stock market. Nostradamus, the famous Medieval astrologer, saw the September 11 attacks coming from a distance of two hundred years. Still think that astronomy is "no use in today's economy"?

On the other hand ....

Evolution:

• Confines itself to talking about theories which could never possibly be tested by experiment. Never makes a testable prediction of any kind. When asked to produce evidence for their theories, evolutionists usually resort to childish ad hominem attacks, which typically boil down to demanding that anyone who disagrees with them prove that evolution isn't true. As everyone knows, you can't prove a negative, and the only surprising thing is that the evolutionists have got away with the obvious logical fallacy of "the burden of proof" for so long.
• Never keeps its story straight from one year to the next. First we had Darwin telling us that individuals selected each other by sexual intercourse, then Lamarck telling us that adaptation was the key, then Lysenko telling us that it was all about "heredity" and nowadays Dawkins says no, that was all rubbish, evolution is true, but it's really all about genes!
• Picks fights all the time with really ridiculous unscientific nuts, like the so-called "Creation Scientists", just to make a hell of a lot of noise, distract schools from the real educational issues, and divert attention from its own failings.

Out of these two scientific theories, I ask you, which one is putting on a hell of a show of acting like "scientists" and which one is quietly and methodically getting on with the business of telling us useful things to know about the future? Proper science is under threat from religion every day, and if we're going to win the battle against the fundamentalists, we're going to have to pick our fights carefully. Up until now, the scientific establishment has decided that evolution is the horse it wants to back, with notable lack of success. It's time to give up on the dead-loss research project of trying to patch up evolutionary theory and switch to a different battleground. The fundamentalists will find it a bit more difficult to come up with their usual weaselly rationalisations and pseudoscientific excuses when faced with meeting the hard-nosed quantitative science of astronomy in open debate! Astrology is the science of the future. Evolution is the science of the past. Let's get serious here, people