Thanks Bill, I do appreciate your responses.

I'm glad you've said more about the 'crank' post - it was quite unclear that you were pointing to examples of 'extreme' astrology.

I don't think our dispute is semantic. I think it's about whether the scientific method is the only appropriate method of acquiring knowledge.

What,in your weltanschauung (world view),appears beyond examination is the status of the tester and their methods. For you,the scientific method itself is to be taken for granted. I can easily understand why anyone who stands by it,for job,past experience,psychological,philosophical or other reasons, would resist or object to the method itself coming into question. As I heard somebody say once,'if astrology is true then science is false.' Obviously if you think that then you'd not really going to take any argument for astrology seriously,however rationally,level-headedly or sensibly they might be put.

You used two indicative words. 'Predict' and 'influence'. A lot of us astrologers are agnostic or atheist about 'influence'. That's because of a different understanding of the universe from the scientific one. Astrologers talk more of 'correlation' i.e.the same thing at many levels.That is because of a view of the unverse where at each moment,the universe has a pattern,discernable at every level from the universal to the subatomic.So the planetary pattern of the moment is a way of 'reading off' that pattern.

Work has and is being done about 'influence',and I could cite examples,but correlation is the astological preference.

Prediction has many aspects to it. Astrologers don't go in for precise prediction on the whole because,alas,charts/horoscopes have to be interpreted,and because everything in astrology is multi-symbolic,so you don't have the one-for-onr correspondences that science would look for (That's another part of science's ideology,perhaps.). Timing gets interfered with by the fact that astrologers believe people have free will, so how a pattern will play out is from a range of possibilities.

And when astrologers are dealing with individual clients,well some of us are about encouraging our clients to see the choices available from forthcoming patterns,so that the clint can choose both realistically ('that's the pattern') and nourishingly and with awareness.

Now that is problematic because as us psychotherapists know,people,by and large,find the idea of taking their responsibility in their lives tremendously difficult. Loads of people don't want to,hence blaming,where in shifting responsibility,they can be annoyed with others and be helpless victims all at once.

Lastly,astrology got to many of its findings thru several THOUSAND years of observation and correlation (quite apart from a different take on the universe from our scientific one,as sketched above)

That's part of an answer to what the alternatives to the scientific method mught be.

Enough for the moment.






      Ivor