I am interested in astrology since 1983. I used to be keen on it but (especially after I had done some scientific research on it) I became a skeptic. However, I am ready for discussion. From the point of view of the science, the main problem of astrology is lack of confirmation by scientific tests. Even famous tests performed by Gauquelin have turned out to be erroneous and discussions if they mean anything non-trivial last until now. Below I show my previous thoughts about astrology.
Above all: astrology is not a science. It is a set of some recipes collected through a few thousands years - often in disagreement with each other, it resembles medicine in XVI-XVII century and it waits for its Enlightenment. But in the Enlightenment epoch (in medicine) they simply rejected tradition and started to create medicine again, now it becomes clear that it was wrong and there is a come back to the traditional (natural) medicine. I think that it would be wrong to reject everything that was done after Enlightenment: we should choose the best from both sides.
What are the implications for astrology? It is necessary to start to verify astrology but not to reject tradition automatically - it is necessary to test it very carefully but not to reject only because they are not verified yet. That is the reason why I do not like what is being done now.
From one side we have astrologers. There are a lot of traditional astrologers - they want to prevent astrology from any changes so it causes stagnation. There are also humanist astrologers which threat astrology as an art, they look for connections with culture etc. In general, they draw their conclusions carefully and they try to verify their theories in practice but some of them try to fit astrology to some philosophical and religious systems due to the Hegel Principle: Facts don't fit to theory? Down with facts! I think it is even worse than strict keeping to tradition: instead of stagnation it increases existing chaos and it may make astrology to be a trash can that everyone could throw anything in. I am keen on third branch of astrology: positivist astrology which stresses empirical research.
We can divide astrologers in other way, too: theorists, experimentalists and practitioners. Theorists make new theories, experimentalists verify them and practitioners interpret horoscopes. Now a big majority of astrologers are practitioners, some of them are also theorists and there are almost no experimentalists. In my opinion, it is one of the greatest weaknesses of nowaday astrology - lack of straightforward verification.
From the other side we have scientists, especially astronomers - they often go mad if they hear the word astrology. Fortunately, not all scientists think that astrological beliefs are created by fantasy because they don't have and they can't have any scientific substantiation. Some of them try to verify astrology statistically but usually they do it wrong. Why? Because they take better or less known astrologers and check if they make good horoscopes. It is wrong because it tests astrologers' knowledge only - it is possible to proof only that applying traditional astrology gives bad effects (or good but up to now results would suggest the opposite). Even the most negative results do not negate the basis of astrology that can be expressed in the statement there exists some corellation between celestial positions of planets during and in the place of birthtime and personal capabilities. What do we need to do ?
The only method would be something started by a French astrologer, Michel Gauquelin. He took birthtimes of a few dozens of thousands of doctors, sportsmen, soldiers, actors etc. and tried to look for common elements in their horoscopes. I think it is the only good method to verify astrology. A pioneer of such research in Poland is dr Mariusz Karlinski from the Association of Astrologers in Poznan. Another method would be to compare planets' positions in the days of birth and death - especially for some special kind of death (e.g. execution, traffic accident, war, some illness ...). It is important to have good statistics: good results may be achieved if it exceeds 10000 cases. It will be possible to construct a good theory only if we have really a lot of data. It will be a pure phenomenological one because we do not know anything about the mechanism (we can exclude simple gravitional attraction: effect of tables etc. in the room would be greater than effect of planets).
O.K., but what to do now - we do not have any ready theory! Hmm, it is necessary to use traditional astrology knowing that results may be incorrect. The best solution would be to do some statistical research.
If you do not know principles of the traditional astrology you can click here.
I have written a program to make horoscopes: ASTROLOG for DOS and OS/2.
Wojciech Jozwiak
Kazimierz Urbanczyk
Boguslaw Kaluski. Astrological
translations and forecast. Poznan.