How Astrology Works
For the last little bit, Richard Rockley at Skeptico has been posting answers he's received in response to his "Astrology Challenge", which asks the question "how did they make all this stuff up to begin with", surely a defining question.
As he discusses this latest response to his query, he claims to find the explanation a bit on the impenetrable side.
Tsk. I think he just needs to loosen his mental processes, relax and go with the worldlines.
I once encountered a similar problem with a self-proclaimed astrology skeptic (who wasn't terribly skeptical) in a Usenet newsgroup. He wrote:
Y'know, I would have a lot more faith in things astrological, if sometime during one of my (admittedly few) professional readings, the reader had noticed that I was born during a total eclipse. I can't imagine a much more dramatc sky event during a much more dramatic time of my life, and while I'm fairly openminded, having a professional completely miss that little detail makes me somewhat skeptical about the whole science.
I wrote (I have a copy of the original posting here):
I suppose it's just possible that an unseen confluence of celestial hyperethereality may have negatively impacted on the harmonic forces of the occultation, but that doesn't seem very likely, does it?
Or, perhaps there was a metadegradation of the interspheroidal tides, which has been known
to lead to intragravitational anomolies in the Riemannian curvature of the space-graviton continuum. This can really mess up the Levi-Cevita tensor [in contraction], promoting the appearance of spontaneous singularities in the field equations. Usually, though, this effect is rather small. Assuming, of course, that one accepts the strong equivalence principle.
I'm much more inclined to think that the problem was an obscuration in the actual charting of
the stellar systhesis plot. Most likely this was brought on because you were born on the descending limb of the solsticial ascension.
Now, eclipses at that nexus are rather rare events, so computing the higher-order corrections in the perturbation expansions is a very tricky business, and rotational polarization aberrations can sometimes result in prolate oblateness. Nasty.
Be skeptical if you want, but we're talking science here.
If you ask me, this answer would work just as well as a general explanation for how astrology could work so accurately — the answer is that good.
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on Sunday, 30 October 2005 at 13.30
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There's more to astrology than skeptics realize. At one point in history, astrology was a rational construct based upon the Athenian philosophical school, but opposed to the idea that the concrete particular was unknowable.
If you want serious debate on this subject, visit http://www.projecthindsight.com and study. Robert Schmidt has made some amazing advances in understanding the philosophy behind the ancient texts.
I'm not surprised that you find the comments by astrologers here lack critical thinking. The astrology that was once practiced 2000 years ago is no longer. What is in place now does not really pass for a "logic of the stars".