• Quick note - the problem with Youtube videos not embedding on the forum appears to have been fixed, thanks to ZiprHead. If you do still see problems let me know.

Hows Astrology work?

I've always wondered why the planets only exert their gravitational influence at the time of birth. Do they just stop caring when the baby is one minute old?

One prematurely-born woo woman I know actually uses the astrological sign from when she should have been born, because she'd rather be a Pisces than a Capricorn. I'd like to say, "Astrology doesn't work that way" except for the niggling detail that it doesn't work at all.
 
Kuko 4000 said:
I've heard something similar to this several times, but never remembered to find the source afterwards, any chance of a good link where this is presented? It's a good little snippet to include in a discussion.
Click to expand...

I don't think I have enough posts under my belt to post links. However if you put 3 w before this etsu.edu/physics/etsuobs/starprty/22099dgl/planalign.htm which comes from 3 w badastronomy.com/bad/misc/planets.html
 
Last edited:
Tricky said:
Back when I believed in astrology, (Yes, I used to be a woo) I came up with the brilliant theory that the celestial bodies subtly influenced the separation of chromosomes during meiosis, preferring some configurations over others. "Therefore", I reasoned, "Astrology works, but it's off by nine months". Of course, if I'd thought a little deeper, I'd have realized that the creation of sperm, and especially ova, happens long before conception. And it has since been pointed out to me that nearby objects exert more gravitational pull (because of their proximity) than the stars. So if you resulted from your mom getting knocked up in the back of a car, your astrological sign is "Buick".
Click to expand...
I had a logic professor who also pointed out that if astrology worked, wouldn't the date of conception be more important than the date of birth?


Akhenaten said:
You might wish to add that before 1781, Uranus had no effect at all, Neptune only started influencing things after 1846 and little Pluto wasn't on anyone's chart until 1930.
Click to expand...
And I guess Pluto has gone back to doing nothing for (or to) anybody...
 
Sun Countess said:
One prematurely-born woo woman I know actually uses the astrological sign from when she should have been born, because she'd rather be a Pisces than a Capricorn. I'd like to say, "Astrology doesn't work that way" except for the niggling detail that it doesn't work at all.
Click to expand...

Haha great one!
 
Akhenaten said:
You might wish to add that before 1781, Uranus had no effect at all, Neptune only started influencing things after 1846 and little Pluto wasn't on anyone's chart until 1930.
Click to expand...

There is some evidence that the ancients might have seen uranus, it is right on the edge of optic visibility and some drugs can enhance acuity.

People always forget ceres and vesta (not a dwarf planet) !
 
I think most believers have learned to avoid talking about any real force like gravity or even some real physical force that's just not yet known. (And Phil Plaitt's excellent essay on the topic addresses the logical problems with such supposed explanations.*)

The more nuanced explanations I've heard from believers have to do with a fundamental difference in how people view reality. A lot of New-age types think that we each create our own reality, and that there is no single objective reality. (I think they confuse "perception" with reality to get to that point. They also misunderstand a lot of modern physics--and use "quantum" like a magical incantation.)

At any rate, many of them say that it's more about intuition and skills of the astrologer, and that all the planet stuff is just an arbitrary framework to hang those skills onto. I think that's a particularly dishonest response since they also claim that the planets influence human activity, but it's one I've heard often.

*BTW, one of my favorite points in that essay is that unlike real folk remedies (as, for example, willow bark's properties due to salicylic acid) that are based on a system of trial and error, astrological truisms are simply received wisdom. There never was someone hypothesizing that someone born with certain celestial arrangements might have a certain personality, and let's see if that holds true. Nope? Then maybe it's another. Instead, from the very beginning, astrological pronouncement were just presented as truisms.

And of course, now we know that no such correlations even exist, and therefore no explanations are even necessary.
 
I remember one discussion about "when your sign was fixed" and one of my Believer friends said that it was fixed by passage through the birth canal. "So c-section babies don't have a sign?" I replied. She hummed and hawed and said it was "complex".

I also pointed out that quite often these days, a child's birth date is determined by when the doctor induces labor, which he may do to fit his schedule. So if you're born on the cusp, your sign could be determined by whether or not the doctor was playing golf that weekend.
 
Tricky said:
So if you're born on the cusp, your sign could be determined by whether or not the doctor was playing golf that weekend.
Click to expand...
Ah but nothing is arbitrary, it's all your destiny and what the stars have in store for you ;-)
 
Just for fun I looked in one of my old astrology books by Stephen Arroyo to see what he said about how it works. He went on for several pages but it all seemed to boil down to this: "One objection to astrology that is often heard from 'scientists' who actually do not want to consider it remotely possible that astrology could be valid in any way is the idea that those who practice astrology cannot show any 'cause and effect mechanism' whereby the planets could exert any 'influence.'... The best refutation to this attempt to dismiss astrology is to explain that...throughout the history of science 'the hardest thing to define is mechanism.' All sorts of workable scientific principles and techniques and many kinds of medicines are employed routinely throughout the world without there being any understanding of how they work."

To summarize, some things just work, just because they do!

I was into this in my 20s and always heard that the birth time had to be the time recorded on the birth certificate.

Since no REAL woo explanation can be complete without mentioning "energy," I had some vague notion that every planet had a type of spiritual energy associated with it. This combination of energies somehow made a unique individual imprint on the soul at the time of birth - something mysterious but understood by astrologers/people more spiritually enlightened than me since ancient times. You could understand this imprint by looking at a natal chart.

I think most of my friends who studied astrology had a similar vague understanding that it worked this way.
 
Astrology works by efficiently separating woo from their money.

Apart from that, it doesn't work at all, of course.
 
ExMinister said:
Just for fun I looked in one of my old astrology books by Stephen Arroyo to see what he said about how it works. He went on for several pages but it all seemed to boil down to this: "One objection to astrology that is often heard from 'scientists' who actually do not want to consider it remotely possible that astrology could be valid in any way is the idea that those who practice astrology cannot show any 'cause and effect mechanism' whereby the planets could exert any 'influence.'... The best refutation to this attempt to dismiss astrology is to explain that...throughout the history of science 'the hardest thing to define is mechanism.' All sorts of workable scientific principles and techniques and many kinds of medicines are employed routinely throughout the world without there being any understanding of how they work."

To summarize, some things just work, just because they do!
Click to expand...
Yes, I've heard things like that too. Usually they'll trot out something like "we don't know how magnetism works, but it does." And there is an element of truth in that, but they leave out the important part, which is verifying that they DO work. We can predict how and when magnets will work so well that we build elaborate machines that incorporate them. Some of these machines (like a MRI) are so amazingly consistent that they can relibly predict what you will find inside a human body when you cut it open.

But were is the body of work that shows the advances that have resulted from the meticulous application of astrology? It seems astrology almost never predicts anything useful, and the occasions that it does are so rare as to be easily the result of blind luck. The most famous predictive astronomer the world has ever known, Nostradamus, never seems clear enough in his writings to warn us about something in advance. It is only by post hoc reasoning that his babbling fans seem to understand what he meant.

So I'm fine with Stephen Arroyo claiming that science doesn't require the demonstration of a mechanism to show exactly how the cause and effect works. But by golly you'd better show me some cause and effect. And in this, astrology is a dismal failure.
 
ExMinister said:
Since no REAL woo explanation can be complete without mentioning "energy," I had some vague notion that every planet had a type of spiritual energy associated with it. This combination of energies somehow made a unique individual imprint on the soul at the time of birth - something mysterious but understood by astrologers/people more spiritually enlightened than me since ancient times. You could understand this imprint by looking at a natal chart.

I think most of my friends who studied astrology had a similar vague understanding that it worked this way.
Click to expand...
I know a lot of people consider childbirth a spiritual experience, and I've heard more than one person say, "You can't see a child being born and not believe in god." Not true. And of course the astrologers have to bring the entire universe into the specialness of every single child being born.

Babies are born covered in a combination of vernix, pee, blood, poop, and amniotic fluid, and sometimes getting choked by their own umbilical cord. If anything was going to have an effect on a newborn baby, you'd think that would be it. Oh who knows...somebody out there has probably already tried reading the poop stains and blood smears like tea leaves to predict the child's future. (I know there are myths surrounding babies who are emerge in their amniotic sac along with those with cord issues.)
 
ExMinister said:
"... All sorts of workable scientific principles and techniques and many kinds of medicines are employed routinely throughout the world without there being any understanding of how they work."
Click to expand...
But in those cases, there is verifiable evidence that they do work in the first place.

Rather pointless to try to figure out how something (e.g. astrology) is supposed to work when there is actually no evidence that it works in the first place.
 
Last edited:
Tricky said:
I remember one discussion about "when your sign was fixed" and one of my Believer friends said that it was fixed by passage through the birth canal. "So c-section babies don't have a sign?" I replied. She hummed and hawed and said it was "complex".I also pointed out that quite often these days, a child's birth date is determined by when the doctor induces labor, which he may do to fit his schedule. So if you're born on the cusp, your sign could be determined by whether or not the doctor was playing golf that weekend.
Click to expand...
Idunno/woodwater/etc. claims that astrological signs are fixed at a baby's first breath, which makes about as much sense as anything regarding astrology.
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top Bottom