Astrology - The Arguments For and Against

The Arguments Against Astrology

Deviations in the Earth’s Orbit
Since astrology was first devised, some quite long time ago, the earth’s orbit has shifted.  The earth’s position is shifted 1 star sign from what it was back then.  In other words if the Earth’s orbit had been correctly charted throughout, what we understand now to be the Taurean period, is in fact in Aries (or Gemini is it?).  The entire astrological chart is out by one star sign.

The Analytical Evidence
As yet, there has been no scientific explanation of exactly how astrology works.  Where exactly is the link between, say, Saturn and when is the best time for Julian Bloggs to go to Scotland?  How does it work?  There is no objective analytic evidence.  No maths, no theories, and no explanations.

The Empirical Evidence
Ok, just because we don’t understand how something works doesn’t mean to say it doesn’t work!  Gravity still sucked a long time before Isaac Newton worked out the theory.  So if astrology works we can still measure its effects.  For example, Taureans are supposed to be noted for their love of music.  It is a very simple matter to interview people purchasing music from a shop, and if the assertion is true, a greater than 1/12th proportion of those people should be Taurean.  A scientist making such a study may then draw the conclusion that there is evidence for astrology.  The next step is for the scientist to take the study to their place of research, and a paper is written and presented to one of the scientific journals.  The scientific peers then read it looking for flaws, if there are none it gets published to the wider scientific community and the world can soon benefit from having a better understanding of how our miraculous universe works.  But there is no scientifically collected empirical evidence, there are no study’s; nothing at all.

The Psychological Evidence
The brain works by looking for common threads.  It is our way of working out cause and effect.  When we understand cause and effect we can understand the world better, and so we can survive better in our world, and ultimately pass on our genes.  But our brain does not register non-coincidences.  Now, lets say one particular star sign is described as having, say, a passion for animals.  A person on hearing this will subconsciously look for the patterns - they might say “Ooh I know an Aquarian, and they love animals!  It must be true!”  but their brain works by subconsciously ignoring all the non-coincidences.  The person probably knows hundreds of other non-aquarians