ABSTRACT
The Church has condemned a large variety of superstitions or things that it considered to be superstitions. Foremost among these was astrology, because it encouraged the belief that both individual lives and great historical events depend not on God's will but on the blind forces of the stars, which somehow manage to be both natural and directed. From the rationalist or scientistic point of view, however, the label of superstition applies to all forms of religious belief: belief in God and eternal life, in the efficacy of the sacraments, in miracles and prophecies, in the divinity of Jesus – all these are superstitions. And even though scientific beliefs often change, the scientistic doctrine itself remains the same, unshaken and untouched by the mistakes of science. One such was Eysenck, who was both a hard rationalist and an excellent interpreter of statistical data.
