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Hi Bill
I just wanted to thank you for the time you put into expressing these complex points. It is always refreshing to read your thoughts and I think you manage to find a very balanced and elegant way to summarise the problems we face in our attempts to define what astrology is.

Deb

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Hi again Bill,

Thank you for replying in a so detailed way once again, as you say this is an important matter of discussion in astrology today.

I agree with you that chronobiology is not concerned with meaning at all, and from this standpoint it is true that is not the same as astrological study, however basically they are related in my opinion, as they both are concerned with the study of parallel cycles in time, whatever the interpretation of these given by each discipline, and by the way chronobiology is a scientific recognized area, is a specialty of Biology.

In no way I am reducing astrology to the Gauquelin sectors, what I meant to say is that the fundamentals of astrological correlations has been scientifically proven by Gauquelin, et al., among other positive empirical studies, this is a rock-solid evidence even if not recognised at it is by the mainstream scientific community, so we cannot say that astrology is not related to science anymore.

There are very powerful reasons for to reject Gauquelin's findings, they challenge the current view of the universe, the "rational" mind, many pre-established concepts, they challenge all the existent religions, the current order and model of thought, they challenge politics and almost everything in the current society's established order. But these reasons doesn't mean that Gauquelin's findings aren't real, in fact the "problem" is that they are very Real and scientists (including many astrologers too) don't know how to deal with these.

Nevertheless I agree that not all in astrology makes scientific sense and many is needed to be recycled, many old concepts and techniques that simply are outdated, as ancient house division systems or some predictive techniques as example. Because they were used in the past it doesn't mean that they were perfect or don't need refinement. I don't support the notion that "ALL It's Okay" in astrology without critical thinking.

All the best for you too,

Sonia

18
I am sorry if I sounded too straightforward or abrupt when expressing my opinions in my posts but really exasperates me the lack of a common theory into the community, the recent news about the closing of Kepler College it was too much, as said by Zip Dobyns some decades ago is very disapointing the internal chaos and lack of agreement in so many matters into the community, it doesn't help at all the profession and the future of it, astrology is old enough to achieve some common ground in the XXI century, I can't believe how it is portrayed by many astrologers and astrological major sites and some institutions nowadays.

I hope it can improve with time.

Sonia

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Hi Soniah ? it is nice to ?see? you here
Soniah wrote:the fundamentals of astrological correlations has been scientifically proven by Gauquelin, et al., among other positive empirical studies, this is a rock-solid evidence even if not recognised at it is by the mainstream scientific community, so we cannot say that astrology is not related to science anymore.
Unfortunately, I think that comment completely defines the problem. What you see as ?scientifically proven?, based upon empirical studies which give ?rock-solid evidence?, the mainstream scientific community rejects. Someone obviously needs to redefine something! I don?t think it should be astrologers redefining their traditional techniques, however. In my experience the majority of practicing astrologers do not consider house systems or predictive techniques to be outdated or redundant. As philosophical constructs they are as vibrant and useful in astrological practice as they ever were.
Nevertheless I agree that not all in astrology makes scientific sense and many is needed to be recycled, many old concepts and techniques that simply are outdated, as ancient house division systems or some predictive techniques as example. Because they were used in the past it doesn't mean that they were perfect or don't need refinement. I don't support the notion that "ALL It's Okay" in astrology without critical thinking.
Nothing is perfect, of course, but I have followed my impulse to explore this subject over many years, and I can tell you that my relationship with astrology has never been free of critical thinking. But your idea of critical thinking seems to require the remodelling of astrology into something that suits modern science, and mine doesn't. My critical reasoning has followed the question of where those old rules came from, and why; trying to discover what the philosophy or natural cycle was that gave meaning to the symbolic expression. I work as a horary astrologer and I have a saying about how easy it is to learn horary: it is simple, if you know the basic astrological principles, you can learn it in a day? and then you spend the rest of your life discovering it, and learning to understand it. :)

Through my own experience, and the experiences of my close astrological friends, I have seen how astrological ?belief? gets secured through waves of revelations and realisations, which come as a kind of pay back for the necessary effort of mind and will that is put into understanding some of the principles that don?t initially make sense. So from my perspective, the astrologers who lack critical reasoning are not just those who take up a principle because someone else told them to, without thinking it through for themselves, but also astrologers who want to cast out old thinking because they haven?t bothered to understand the astrological reasoning behind it.

I think my final summary will be that astrology is simply a mirror. The only way to improve astrology, is to elevate the mind and deepen the understanding of the astrologer. Personally, I have no concern about what science or scientists think about astrology. In my opinion most of them lack the necessary understanding to be entitled to an opinion. Contemporary scientists get exasperated that astrology survives in spite of their condemnation, but we have some strength in the fact that most of us have made significant and thought-provoking discoveries for ourselves, as individuals, in contradiction to what society has taught us to think, and not because of it. So as a group we are not nearly as superfical in our thinking as those scientists assme we are - especially when they assume we are all con-artitists or doing it 'just for fun'. But the negative aspect is that whenever we make a collective, it will be a community built of free-thinking, strongly opinionated individiuals; so I guess its rather inevitable that we become self-defeating through our own "internal chaos and lack of agreement". Sad, but inevitable...

With regards
Deb

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Soniah wrote:It's standard astronomy knowledge that planets aren't source of energy.
Before Newton came up with gravity theory, Galileo dismissed the idea of the Moon causing the tides as occult superstition. Science will never be completed. So perhaps a similar thing would count for astrology.
yuzuru wrote:
To perpetuate ancient superstitions doesn't help to build an accurate and modern understanding of Astrology, instead it keeps it in the darkness of the middle ages.
I wrote an answer to this and then erased. Maybe someone with more patience or sense of amusement will answer to the smugness but I don?t have the energy.
I tried it several years ago, I can say that it got bogged down into a sort of Monthy Python sketch.
PFN wrote:Speaking for myself, I find a middle ground to be healthier. Without the scientific drive, we could not hope to see reliable researches on the subject, and even with inconclusive results, I tend to think these help us gather knowledge about astrology. It does take a leap of faith to believe in a art that does not have any way to be proved that we could envision any time soon (and likely, ever). But it would be arrogant to state it is this or that, as of now there is no theory attaching it to empirical finds and vice versa, but that could be just a 'yet'.
The middle way is a good one. Nobody really knows how astrology works, whether we look for some physical theory or a synchronistic one they still are (unproved) theories. The difficulty is the intangibility and untestability of astrology, which sometimes makes me think that it's all senseless. However the subject always seem to draw me back again.
Bill wrote:At the very least, this implies that astrological symbolism and concepts have a strong subjective human dimension, which again tends to rule it out of the science frame (as it is ideally defined).
In my opinion this reflects the subjective-objective issue. I surely acknowledge the human dimension, hence the differences and the intangibility. However an astrology totally disconnected from the planets 'out there' would make them redundant and astrology likewise. That's why I want to retain a spark of a causal/objective factor related to the planets as physical objects. An entirely subjective approach first needs a 'conditioning' of the mind to astrology. Someone with a certain problem needs to be told that this is related to a certain planet/sign/house/aspect and a combination of these. Rather than 'indicating' the problem we would speak of 'initiating' the client .

A very useful approach and when applied properly of great help to the client but it would also mean that we wouldn't need an exactly calculated chart anymore. A wrongly dated chart or even an impossible chart (e.g. with a Mercury square Sun aspect) would suffice to name and treat a problem.
Bill wrote:What I often wonder is how anyone who practices astrology could possibly think that what they are doing is based on the physical mechanics of the solar system. It seems that this is most likely a side effect of the repression of the natural human religious instinct, and is about as likely in reality as a virgin birth. :)
Although any influence of planets is simply to weak to exert any possible influence on humans according to the physical knowledge we have today, I don't want to exclude that one day something measurable will be found one day. Or not but I wouldn't be bothered, just like clairvoyance and telepathy can't be measured I still believe it to be real. Please don't think I imagine influences as in Chris Brennan's humorous illustration in that link, Bill, but I'd rather see influence in the light of the effect that music has on people and the feeling one gets when stepping into a rowdy bar. It's more subtle.
Soniah wrote:I consider Astrology to be a science because it is based in real and measurable facts, not only in anecdotal experience. Gauquelin et al. demonstrated it. Another completely different issue is the challenge that astrology represents to ortodox science as it is a too sophisticated, complex, individualized and subtle science that is almost impossible to measure and replicate astrological facts in a systematized way.
Now Gauquelin has been mentioned I think some remarks would be appropriate. On the one side one often can read that astrology is said to be unmeasurable in a scientific way, i.e. with statistics. One of the reasons is that research often is focussed on some isolated factor, which clashes with the whole approach in astrology. On the other side when it comes to one of the researches of Gauquelin (the only one with positive results and all the others giving insignificant results), this is hailed as the evidence of astrology, even though the results are completely contradictory with usual astrology. This is a bit inconsistent, one should either follow the one or the other way.

There is some "hope" though. Not for the view wich desires to prove astrology in a scientific way but rather for the view that considers the impossibility of forcing astrology in a straightjacket of statistics. There are strong signs that planetary effects like Mars for sports champions etc. might be due to 'social artifacts' found in avoidance-times and -dates of birth. This would make the planetary effects a non-existing issue in statistics and therefore enhance the view that astrology is intangible for scientific research http://rudolfhsmit.nl/g-arti2.htm Please note that the writer of the article (Geoffrey Dean) although a non-believer always speaks respectfully of astrology and is not to be classified under the typical debunkers who indiscriminately dismiss astrology.
Deb wrote:But the negative aspect is that whenever we make a collective, it will be a community built of free-thinking, strongly opinionated individiuals; so I guess its rather inevitable that we become self-defeating through our own "internal chaos and lack of agreement". Sad, but inevitable...
The silver lining of this is that it gives us enough food for discussion :) .

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Hi Deb, thank you for your warm welcome :)

I agree with you that we have a problem with the mainstream scientific community, they seem not to want to open their eyes to the now well-based evidence of the astrological phenomena, Gauquelin's studies had been replicated by many others many times and they are rock-solid scientific evidence of the existence of an astrological phenomena in nature, whether they like to accept it or not. This is why I say that Astrology is scientifically true today - it wasn't scientifically true one century ago, but today it is.

When I was referring to ancient astrological techniques I said that some of them needs to be recycled (in my opinion) or just simply discarded because there are tons of alternative ways to proceed in astrological technique accumulated from many centuries ago which doesn't mean that all of them are right but that they were needed for to develop more precise techniques in astrological practice. Imagine if in Medicine today they would continue bleeding (purging) patients just because it is an ancient healing technique with a philosophical background behind it. The same could apply to the more than 20 existing different types of progressions, through time it was needed to develop the system of progressions, and they developed and experienced it thoroughly but do we use or need all these historical variety of progressions types on current practice? I only use secondary progressions and I think that more than the half of other types of progressions can be simply discarded in modern practice.

Always speaking from my personal standpoint, I have a similiar view of ancient house division systems. When a doctor makes a X-ray medical exam he or she cames with ONE result, not with 10 different results to examine (that would be crazy and very confusing in order to establish an accurate diagnosis). Many astrologers think that different house divisions provide different and valid views of the chart, depending on each house division sytem's purpose. But I don't see this to be coherent, I myself use the Placidus system only because is the only one widely and consistently used with good results in modern practice and the only one that gives me consistent good results too. I would use Regiomontanus for Horary and try Koch at times for to analyze a chart from another view or sharpen transits more accurately maybe, of course I would not say not to these if in practice they consistently work, or I will use the Equal system in order to simplify issues for students, but in standard occidental astrological practice we need to have established a standard model of division at least for natal astrology, just as in occidental Medicine they have a standard model of diagnosis too.

It's not my aim to remodel all entire astrology to suit modern science because science has not the last word in everything, it changes and improves everyday, but I would be more selective with the vast array of traditional techniques used today, and moreover to try to reach a common ground in the profession about what is useful and tested enough to be used today and what is just part of the history of astrology.

Replying to Eddy:

Gauquelin's findings for planetary positions at birth related with vocation are coherent with astrological principles, the right planets are linked to the right traits. If you mean that they aren't coherent because of the house placements I don't think so, I think that they add further light and information about the importance of the rising or culminating planets as example, without they have to clash or restrain astrological traditional theory but to expand it -astrology is expanding continually, look at the many developments made in the last century as example, they don't trash the ancient astrological structure, they gives us more tools to work with.

The importance of Gauquelin's scientific evidence is not that however, but the fact that this scientific evidence demonstrates once and forever the scientific validity of Astrology. But if we say that this evidence shows that "planets has effects on us" then we cannot hope that the mainstream scientific community will take seriously this evidence and logically they will atribute it to artifacts or errors, as it makes not sense at all.

Kind regards,

Sonia

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soniah wrote:... the now well-based evidence of the astrological phenomena, Gauquelin's studies had been replicated by many others many times and they are rock-solid scientific evidence of the existence of an astrological phenomena in nature, whether they like to accept it or not.
Gauquelin's results involve some discrete house positions of the planets at the moment of birth --we may consider these discrete positions a phenomenon of nature.

This natural phenomenon is found to be statistically correlated to profession and/or vocation, and we may call this correlation "an astrological phenomenon".

Up to this point, all we can say is that there is statistical evidence of something that can be called "an astrological phenomenon", but:

1) there is no "scientific" evidence because no scientific model or explanation has been tested, let alone proved, by means of this correlation.

2) there is nothing that warrants the assertion that this correlation is a phenomenon of nature, except a simple hypothesis for which no physical or biological testable model exists.

Gauquelin proposed a simple "planetary heredity" biological explanation to account for the correlation, but never went beyond that point. There is no model or experiment to prove or disprove this explanation, i.e., he never operationalized the hypothesis or put it to test.

So Gauquelin's statistical results are not scientific evidence of anything, because no scientific model existed in the first place, and they are not evidence that astrological phenomena "exist in nature", as long as nobody knows what these "phenomena" could be, i.e., there is no physical or biological tested model or theory that shows how the planet's position is related to vocation or profession.

Juan

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As in Medicine, there is not a need of a causal or biological explanation for how medicine works (ie. Psychiatry) in order to accept scientific evidence (Psychiatry is a science) and you clearly confuse Gauquelin's research on planetary heredity (independent and not related to the correlations birth/vocation he found) with his final rock-solid scientific evidence on astrological phenomena. Please, take a further study of the entire Michel Gauquelin papers, studies, books and work.

This is about scientifically proven astrological correlations, it has nothing to do with the old superstition of causality (planetary influences and biology testing) and are rock-solid scientific FACTS, whether you like these or not.

BTW I don't understand why people tries and insists in keep astrology in the dark realm of superstition while ignoring science and facts. It's absolutely backward!

This makes me think that many people cames to astrology without the remote idea of what astrology truly is, and this seems to be in circle, they came to astrology with their old superstitions and they spread them back again widely outside astrology -this kind of people frankly doesn't help the profession at all.

Patience...

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Soniah wrote:Gauquelin's findings for planetary positions at birth related with vocation are coherent with astrological principles, the right planets are linked to the right traits. If you mean that they aren't coherent because of the house placements I don't think so,...
No I meant it differently. Perhaps I was a bit vague. To say it in a somewhat direct way I don't understand why statistics are dismissed when they give negative results but are welcomed when they give positive results. Non-traditional results wouldn't really bother me by the way. It stimulates to look at it differently.

If you attentively read that link I mentioned monday http://rudolfhsmit.nl/g-arti2.htm then you will see that there are some convincing issues that illustrate that the planetary effects are not real but "artifacts of social behaviour" as the author calls it. But the article explains all that in detail.

This article is the second of three. The first article is also interesting and explains about statistics. http://rudolfhsmit.nl/g-hist2.htm Especially the subject of effect size is interesting. It shows that:"Planetary effects are tinier than they might seem", and for astrology this still means that it would be difficult to fix the results in strict rules.

Perhaps it's a pity but it doesn't need to stop investigating the effects of astrology. I even considered it for a moment, but the subject is too attractive :o . Several issues still convince me of the effectiveness of astrology.

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It doesn't really matter how tiny the results could be, what really matter is that the results BE.

It's more about quality than quantity in this case.

And BTW I already knew all these skeptics pages as the one you linked above :)

nothing really interesting to learn or to conclude from these.

Sonia

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The article pointed out to me that the Gauquelin results may not BE... astrologically. But I'm not really bothered by it. Actually it enhances my doubts about semi-arcs, of which I'm not an advocate.

It took me two weeks to read the entire website. I believe I learnt a lot of interesting new things, I didn't know about the possible social artifacts in the findings of Gauquelin, that was new for me. What did you think of the possibility 'avoidance-times and -dates'?

I believe these people on that website are the most honest skeptics I've ever read. In the 2nd Gauquelin article for example they show how unfair Gauquelin was treated by the skeptic Comit? Para.

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soniah wrote: As in Medicine, there is not a need of a causal or biological explanation for how medicine works (ie. Psychiatry) in order to accept scientific evidence (Psychiatry is a science).
Sorry, but this is absurd. Although it is possible to work on assumptions, noone deems these fields science in it's entirety, even the professionals of the area (that's why psycology is much more oriented to therapy than psychiatry, a field related to mind illness, but much more concerned with physical effects than not).

What they do universally accept is it's possible to administer substances in order to try and alter certain behaviors and reactions, and those medicines have enough research on them to prove their use through theory and practice (i.e, electrical impulses, secretions, body temperature, blood pump, all can be altered through drugs, and there is a reason for each of them, that if unknown, makes the substance questionable). Few doctors outside the field do respect Freud and what came after in the same path. If there is no causal link, there is no science, and that will not change. The rest is, as they call, bad science, that even if showing correlation, can not be proved and/or repeated in numerous ways above chance. And if it can, but have no causal link, then the explanation must be somewhere else. That's what science means.

Even among scientists there is fight over the validity of the entire body of psychiatry. That's the problem with the so called "human sciences", they are not really sciences, jut fields of knowledge trying to fit, like astrology.

Finally, there is no room for error or mistakes in science once proof is supposedly attained, all pertaining it's object should be known. What you are trying to do is redefine science. Good luck on that.
Last edited by PFN on Wed Apr 14, 2010 8:27 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Paulo Felipe Noronha