`` As if - the explanation of Emergence

Under Construction


Dodgy Astological Concepts


We swallow greedily any lie that flatters us, but we sip only little by little at a truth we find bitter - Denis Diderot -


Index


There are, in my opinion, a lot of bad ideas about Astrology, out there in the World. Generally speaking astrologers are a tolerant bunch of people who, I think, accept that not everything is known about their subject, and so they tend not to condemn some of the stranger ideas, such as the possibility of there being 13 signs.


Newspapers


Newspapers have been printing horoscopes since the 1890s, but initially they were a general discussion of how the planets may affect anyone on a particular day. In 1931 R. H. Naylor created the first Sunsign horoscope, tailoring the horoscope to each of the 12 zodiac signs. While this has doubtless been instrumental in increasing the awareness and popularity of Astrology, there is a fundamental flaw in the method that is discrediting to everyone concerned, and undermines Astrology itself.


REFUTATION: Sunsign horoscopes are nonsense, because Astrology is based on the abstract Tropical Zodiac manifesting as [one of many] influences on the inhabitants of the material world. The clothing of the abstract meanings in actual realities happens via the Ascendent, Angles, and Houses, so properly speaking what the newspapers do should be called Rising Sign Astrology, and even then the idea that the current position of planets affects everyone equally is ridiculous, not through any fault in Astrology, but because the effect is dependent on so many other factors, such as the individual's own birth chart, the individual's life circumstances, and the many choices and events that they have lived through up until that point.


Scepticism


Additionally there are those outside Astrology, the sceptics, who I also think, hold more vitriol for Astrology than just about any other subject - it seems particularly to get their goat. This has the consequence that the sceptics appear to lose all reason, and then start putting forward foolish, unfounded, and ill-informed, arguments against Astrology. The following refutes some of the things that they claim [as found out there on the Internet, mostly in Wikipedia]: In short, all of their arguments are fallacious, and demonstrate a gross ignorance of Astrology, and that goes for the celebrated turncoat Geoffrey Dean too. The weakness of their argument is shown by the manner in which they grasp at poor reason ofter poor reason, when all they needed, but what they lack, is one good argument for Astrology being necessarily false.


Ancient objections

Cicero objected because twins can have very differen lives, and that planets are too distant to have an effect, and that Astrology ignores inherited ability, parenting, and other life events. Plotinus objected on various astronomical grounds, and Favorinus objected on what could be called mechanical grounds. Sextus Empiricus objected to the comparison with myths. Carneades argued that fate denies free will and morality, and makes an opposing twins argument, that many can die at the same time, in battle, or natural disasters.


None of these ancient objections are actually valid. They demonstrate a complete disregard for Astrology being about meaning, not about a physical force. Meaning does not have physical position, it is a collection of abstract facts, that may or may not pertain to material objects. They also disregard that other factors combine with any astrological meanings, and that there is much greater granularity to Astrology than anyone perceives. Also, as Robert Sapolsky has pointed out, Biology is more of a nail in the coffin of Free Will.


The standard of objections has not improved much over the centuries, and if they point to anything it is that astrologers, like anyone including scientists, are only human and can be fallible. That fact alone cannot invalidate Astrology, any more than inaccurate science can be used as an argument against causality.


Theological viewpoints

St. Augustine believed it conflicted with Free Will, and the goodness of God, and twins, yes twins again - not for the last time.


Frankly, the argument by Free Will is as stupid as claiming that the rain stops you playing cricket. No, fucking no! It is your choice to play, or not; maybe the umpire's if you have one. The weather is an incidental fact that you may respond to, or not, if you notice it. As for twins, look at Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito - one clearly exercised more than the other! Maybe they were not actually born at precisely the same second. Get this through your heads people; birth is a starting point, it has its circumstances, but every event following birth modifies one's life; the birthchart is a starting point, and every astrological event modifies the astrological weather. If twins do the same thing or not it is neither here nor there.


Muslim astronomers such as Al-Farabi (Alpharabius), Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen), and Avicenna, said that the methods of astrologers conflicted with orthodox views of Islamic scholars, by suggesting that the Will of God can be known in advance. Avicenna's point was not so much against Astrology per se, but against the possibility of knowing its detail. Ibn Qayyim Al-Jawziyya returned to the physicalist argument. The Jewish philosopher Maimonides wrote that Astrology is forbidden by Jewish law. And who decreed that, God?


Similarly, the Catholic Church maintains that divination is incompatible with modern Catholic beliefs such as free will:


All forms of divination are to be rejected: recourse to Satan or demons, conjuring up the dead or other practices falsely supposed to 'unveil' the future. Consulting horoscopes, astrology, palm reading, interpretation of omens and lots, the phenomena of clairvoyance, and recourse to mediums all conceal a desire for power over time, history, and, in the last analysis, other human beings, as well as a wish to conciliate hidden powers. They contradict the honor, respect, and loving fear that we owe to God alone.
- Catechism of the Catholic Church .


Jesus H. Fucking Christ! How stupid are they? Answer: very. The whole thing about the Solar System, as any bloody astronomer should know, is that it is predictable to a very high degree. Anyway, there is no God, so get the fuck out of Dodge.


You may be starting to notice that I find sceptics, and their ridiculous arguments, intensely irritating. Maybe you find me irritating, well, it won't get us anywhere. We have to learn to stick to the point, and not be sidetracked by anyone's ignorance. The point is that Astrology is a language of meaning, not material forces, and as such is an influence on a par with the still small voice of conscience. It paints a picture of your spirit, and your spirit is also composed of meaning, and nothing else. Meaning is exactly the same thing as facts, so fer gawd's sake; stick to the bloody facts.


Scientific analysis and criticism

Popper proposed falsifiability as something that distinguishes science from non-science, using astrology as the example of an idea that has not dealt with falsification during experiment.


REFUTATION:


The scientific community rejects astrology as having no explanatory power for describing the universe, and considers it a pseudoscience.


REFUTATION: There are many things that the scientific community cannot explain, even when they are playing on home ground.


Scientific testing of astrology has been conducted, and no evidence has been found to support any of the premises or purported effects outlined in astrological traditions.


REFUTATION:


There is no proposed mechanism of action by which the positions and motions of stars and planets could affect people and events on Earth that does not contradict well understood, basic aspects of biology and physics.


REFUTATION: How many times does it need to be said, Astrology is not a physical reality. There are no atoms of Astrology. It is a ridiculous straw man argument to criticise Astrology in these terms.


Those who continue to have faith in astrology have been characterised as doing so '...in spite of the fact that there is no verified scientific basis for their beliefs, and indeed that there is strong evidence to the contrary.'


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Confirmation bias is a form of cognitive bias, a psychological factor that contributes to belief in astrology.


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Astrology believers tend to selectively remember predictions that turn out to be true, and do not remember those that turn out false.


Another, separate, form of confirmation bias also plays a role, where believers often fail to distinguish between messages that demonstrate special ability and those that do not. Thus there are two distinct forms of confirmation bias that are under study with respect to astrological belief.


REFUTATION:


Demarcation

Under the criterion of falsifiability, first proposed by the philosopher of science Karl Popper, astrology is a pseudoscience. Popper regarded astrology as 'pseudo-empirical' in that 'it appeals to observation and experiment,' but 'nevertheless does not come up to scientific standards.' In contrast to scientific disciplines, astrology has not responded to falsification through experiment.


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In contrast to Popper, the philosopher Thomas Kuhn argued that it was not lack of falsifiability that makes astrology unscientific, but rather that the process and concepts of astrology are non-empirical.


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Kuhn thought that, though astrologers had, historically, made predictions that categorically failed, this in itself does not make astrology unscientific, nor do attempts by astrologers to explain away failures by claiming that creating a horoscope is very difficult. Rather, in Kuhn's eyes, astrology is not science because it was always more akin to medieval medicine; astrologers followed a sequence of rules and guidelines for a seemingly necessary field with known shortcomings, but they did no research because the fields are not amenable to research, and so 'they had no puzzles to solve and therefore no science to practise.' While an astronomer could correct for failure, an astrologer could not. An astrologer could only explain away failure but could not revise the astrological hypothesis in a meaningful way. As such, to Kuhn, even if the stars could influence the path of humans through life astrology is not scientific.


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The philosopher Paul Thagard asserts that astrology cannot be regarded as falsified in this sense until it has been replaced with a successor. In the case of predicting behaviour, psychology is the alternative. To Thagard a further criterion of demarcation of science from pseudoscience is that the state-of-the-art must progress and that the community of researchers should be attempting to compare the current theory to alternatives, and not be 'selective in considering confirmations and disconfirmations.'


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Progress is defined here as explaining new phenomena and solving existing problems, yet astrology has failed to progress having only changed little in nearly 2000 years. To Thagard, astrologers are acting as though engaged in normal science believing that the foundations of astrology were well established despite the 'many unsolved problems,' and in the face of better alternative theories (psychology). For these reasons Thagard views astrology as pseudoscience.


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For the philosopher Edward W. James, astrology is irrational not because of the numerous problems with mechanisms and falsification due to experiments, but because an analysis of the astrological literature shows that it is infused with fallacious logic and poor reasoning.


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What if throughout astrological writings we meet little appreciation of coherence, blatant insensitivity to evidence, no sense of a hierarchy of reasons, slight command over the contextual force of critieria, stubborn unwillingness to pursue an argument where it leads, stark naivete concerning the effiacacy of explanation and so on? In that case, I think, we are perfectly justified in rejecting astrology as irrational. ... Astrology simply fails to meet the multifarious demands of legitimate reasoning. - Edward W. James


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Effectiveness

Astrology has not demonstrated its effectiveness in controlled studies and has no scientific validity. Where it has made falsifiable predictions under controlled conditions, they have been falsified. One famous experiment included 28 astrologers who were asked to match over a hundred natal charts to psychological profiles generated by the California Psychological Inventory (CPI) questionnaire. The double-blind experimental protocol used in this study was agreed upon by a group of physicists and a group of astrologers nominated by the National Council for Geocosmic Research, who advised the experimenters, helped ensure that the test was fair and helped draw the central proposition of natal astrology to be tested. They also chose 26 out of the 28 astrologers for the tests (two more volunteered afterwards). The study, published in Nature in 1985, found that predictions based on natal astrology were no better than chance, and that the testing '...clearly refutes the astrological hypothesis.'


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In 1955, the astrologer and psychologist Michel Gauquelin stated that though he had failed to find evidence that supported indicators like zodiacal signs and planetary aspects in astrology, he did find positive correlations between the diurnal positions of some planets and success in professions that astrology traditionally associates with those planets. The best-known of Gauquelin's findings is based on the positions of Mars in the natal charts of successful athletes and became known as the Mars effect. A study conducted by seven French scientists attempted to replicate the claim, but found no statistical evidence. They attributed the effect to selective bias on Gauquelin's part, accusing him of attempting to persuade them to add or delete names from their study.


REFUTATION: Gauquelin is largely irrelevant to Astrology, the statistical significance of the Mars effect is tiny, and if he found nothing to report, one can only imagine that he was asking the wrong question.


Geoffrey Dean has suggested that the effect may be caused by self-reporting of birth dates by parents rather than any issue with the study by Gauquelin. The suggestion is that a small subset of the parents may have had changed birth times to be consistent with better astrological charts for a related profession. The number of births under astrologically undesirable conditions was also lower, indicating that parents choose dates and times to suit their beliefs. The sample group was taken from a time where belief in astrology was more common. Gauquelin had failed to find the Mars effect in more recent populations, where a nurse or doctor recorded the birth information.


REFUTATION: This is laughable, first off the Gauquelin effect was so tiny as to really not be worth considering. But to suggest that parents consistently lied about birth times on official documents, across France, and possibly other parts of Europe, is preposterous.


Dean, a scientist and former astrologer, and psychologist Ivan Kelly conducted a large scale scientific test that involved more than one hundred cognitive, behavioural, physical, and other variables—but found no support for astrology. Furthermore, a meta-analysis pooled 40 studies that involved 700 astrologers and over 1,000 birth charts. Ten of the tests - which involved 300 participants - had the astrologers pick the correct chart interpretation out of a number of others that were not the astrologically correct chart interpretation (usually three to five others). When date and other obvious clues were removed, no significant results suggested there was any preferred chart.


REFUTATION: This is clearly a bogus claim, because it is impossible to remove the 'date' from a chart, as the content of each chart is specific to a particular date. The problem is what is considered to be a suitable chart for a test, and it is very easy to pick a large number of relatively meaningless events and find nothing notable. It would be the equivalent of testing a healthy population for Ebola, and on finding none concluding that Ebola does not exist.


Lack of mechanisms and consistency

Testing the validity of astrology can be difficult, because there is no consensus amongst astrologers as to what astrology is or what it can predict. Most professional astrologers are paid to predict the future or describe a person's personality and life, but most horoscopes only make vague untestable statements that can apply to almost anyone.


REFUTATION: Are you talking about the garbage that they print in newspapers? Shame on you!


Many astrologers claim that astrology is scientific, while some have proposed conventional causal agents such as electromagnetism and gravity. Scientists reject these mechanisms as implausible since, for example, the magnetic field, when measured from earth, of a large but distant planet such as Jupiter is far smaller than that produced by ordinary household appliances.


REFUTATION: Really? I doubt any astrologer worth the name would consider such claims valid, so this really is just another straw man argument.


Western astrology has taken the earth's axial precession (also called precession of the equinoxes) into account since Ptolemy's Almagest, so the 'first point of Aries', the start of the astrological year, continually moves against the background of the stars. The tropical zodiac has no connection to the stars, and as long as no claims are made that the constellations themselves are in the associated sign, astrologers avoid the concept that precession seemingly moves the constellations. Charpak and Broch, noting this, referred to astrology based on the tropical zodiac as being '...empty boxes that have nothing to do with anything and are devoid of any consistency or correspondence with the stars.' Sole use of the tropical zodiac is inconsistent with references made, by the same astrologers, to the Age of Aquarius, which depends on when the vernal point enters the constellation of Aquarius.


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Astrologers usually have only a small knowledge of astronomy, and often do not take into account basic principles - such as the precession of the equinoxes, which changes the position of the sun with time. They commented on the example of Elizabeth Teissier, who claimed that, 'The sun ends up in the same place in the sky on the same date each year,' as the basis for claims that two people with the same birthday, but a number of years apart, should be under the same planetary influence. Charpak and Broch noted that, 'There is a difference of about twenty-two thousand miles between Earth's location on any specific date in two successive years,' and that thus they should not be under the same influence according to astrology. Over a 40 years period there would be a difference greater than 780,000 miles.


REFUTATION: Charpak and Broch are making a serious error when they fail to learn the language of those that thy wish to criticise. It just makes those two look foolish. Teissier was clearly talking in terms of the Tropical Zodiac, so their criticism fails on all counts.


Pseudoscience


Sceptics like to classfy Astrology as a pseudoscience, especially so since Paul Thagard 's 1978 paper:Why Astrology is a Pseudoscience which is a crock of shit


REFUTATION: .


Traditions


The traditions of Astrology stretch back into antiquity, many thousands of years, and of course, there are some hardline traditionalists within the astrological community, but that is not pertinent as to whether all of the traditions are actually valid.


Planetary Rulerships

The dignity of planets is a central tenet of Astrology, one that binds together many of the techniques, such that it is important to know that the Sun rules Leo, etc. However, if we ask why a certain planet rules a certain sign, we find that the justification is very weak. In essence, it boils down to it being hot in summer, which of course is very Euro-centric.


The dignity of planets is helpful, and I believe caught on because of two reasons; firstly, that empirical use showed it to work well a lot of the time, and secondly, because the system chosen happened to be 50% correct. I suspect that these two facts are not unrelated. Any random system is likely to be 50% correct, and spotting that there is a connection between Leo, and the Sun, and Summer in the Mediterranean, is random as far as the other planets go. It just so happens that the Moon and Cancer match, as do Mercury and Gemini, and Jupiter and Sagittarius. However, these connections may have gone some way towards defining the nature of both the planets and the signs. More modern additions, namely Uranus and Neptune, have been assigned according to their nature, which seems more in accord with the manner in which exaltations such as Saturn in Libra, may have come about.


The dignities form a very feudal system, one of lords and masters, and favoured fiends, so just on republican principle I would be 'agin it'. For me, I see a possibility of a modern Astrology being based on complete theory, and all of the concepts emerging from fundamental truths. In this the concept of dignity is still one of strength, but is wholly justified by the elemental nature of the signs and the elemental functions of the planets.


Benefic and Malefic Planets

Another central tenet of Astrology is that some planets - Venus and Jupiter - are always good, the benefics, while others - Mars and Saturn - the malefics, are always bad. There really is no such thing as a good or a bad planet, they each just have their own specific function, which may turn out well or less well in individual circumstances. The reputations of planets comes from their products, and historically - when life was brutal and the rest - planets producing reality came in for a bad rap, whereas planets producing something more spiritual, i.e. fire, were better regarded as the truth was less likely to be directly harmful in a noticeable manner.


Even though old habits die hard, we ought to never be too afraid, nor too welcoming of planets. Rather, attempt to see each clearly for what it is, and for what it is not.


The Sidereal Zodiac

There are two zodiacs; the Sidereal Zodiac of the stars, and the Tropical Zodiac of Astrology, based on the orbit of the Earth around the Sun, i.e. the seasons. Generally in the West we use the Tropical Zodiac, and in the East they use the Sidereal Zodiac. Due to precession, there is a slowly increasing difference between the two, and I doubt that both of them can be correct. There is, I suppose, a slight chance that cultural differences account for different systems working in other places, but I personally find no sense in, nor rationale for, the Sidereal Zodiac.


Modernisms


Astrologers frequently come up with new ideas, new techniques, and new concepts. This refutes one of the sceptics criticisms, but also opens the door for the fanciful. Now, many might claim my novel ideas fanciful, but I can point to their consistency with theory, so novelty, in itself, is no argument against modernising. In any case, Astrology had to adapt to the discovery of three previously unknown planets; Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto. However there have been some new concepts that are less justifiable, although that does not necessarily make them wrong, only less likely to be true.


The Thirteenth Sign

You will frequently see people making claims for novel features in Astrology, and while concepts such as a thirteenth sign may be entertaining, they should never be entertained. There is a strict structure to Astrology and the Zodiac, because the structure has meaning, and when it comes to signs, there is simply no logical possibility of there being a thirteenth sign, just because all the ways that a sign, planet, house, or even a chakra or a god, can be are already taken.


Sabian Symbols

There must be something that distinguishes one degree from another, and so about a century ago they came up with the idea of Sabian Symbols - psychically derived vignettes to give each degree extra character. However, the Mandala Zodiac provides all the necessary distinguishing between degrees, giving each one a unique elemental makeup. So, really, there is not much use in Sabian Symbols.


Arabian Parts

There must be something that distinguishes one degree from another, and so many centuries ago the Arab astrologers started inventing Arabian Parts, such as the Part of Fortune, and the Part of Death. The system is somewhat similar to the concept of midpoints, but their validity has to be somewhat dubious, unless someone makes a full study that shows that transits to these particular points do indeed have some special meaning, over and above the effect of the transits themselves.


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(External Website) An explanation of the nature of Signs


(External Website) An explanation of the nature of Planets


(External Website) An explanation of the nature of Houses


(External Website) An explanation of the nature of Aspects


(External Website) Back to Astrology



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