Astrology and Science
Astrology: Art or Science?
Is Astrology an art or is it a science? This may seem like an odd question, but the fact of the matter is that astrologers appear to want to have it both ways. On the one hand, they claim that what they do is something like an art, requiring a particular "feel" for the nature of celestial events and human beings. On the other hand, they try to paint their work with the brush of scientific accuracy and validity in the hopes that such an association will help justify what they do.
Do astrologers ever claim that what they do is a science? Yes, they certainly do. As an easy example, astrologycom.com defines astrology as "The science of the stars." Books on astrology will regularly cite various statistical studies which they claim validate astrological work. All of this points to the fact that astrologers would like to be thought of as practicing something which is rigorous, scientific and objective.
The actual practice of astrology is also generally made to appear very scientific. When creating someone's chart, an astrologer first has to fix the exact time of the person's birth, then translate that time into Greenwich Mean Time, then translate that into sidereal time, then translate that back into local sidereal time. After all of this is finished, the astrologer needs to perform elaborate calculations to determine zodical and planetary positions for this exact time.
The problem is, however, that astrology is not supported by sound and verified scientific research, like statistical studies. Astrology is not based upon collected data and carefully controlled, objective observations. Astrology is not based up falsifiable predictions which are tested and re-tested by independent observers and researchers.
Astrologers will respond to this by arguing that such research is expensive and time-consuming, and they do not have access to either the time or money necessary. They might even argue that they are deliberately excluded from those resources by a disbelieving, not to mention hostile, academic and scientific establishment.
This, however, ignores that fact that quite a few scientific studies have been done on astrology, and in each case the claims and premises of the astrologers have failed. Furthermore, it also ignores the fact that most astrologers simply don't know anything about conducting or evaluating such research - something which underscores the lack of scientific training and knowledge which is characteristic of astrology.
Astrologers may further argue that astrology is too complex for standard scientific protocols to handle. For example, the astrological chart is supposed to have more information than scientists can factor for - a typical chart can include 30 to 40 major factors and another 60 to 70 minor factors, resulting in a bewildering array of permutations, combinations and possible interpretations. This does not, however, explain why astrologers are unable to match charts with people at a rate better than chance. After all, can it be argued that these charts are too complex for astrologers to handle?
It is at this point that astrologers will often start to argue that astrology is not so much a science (like physics) but more of an art, philosophy, or at best a social science.
The identification of astrology as an art is only to be expected, because once the math has been completed and all the charts are drawn up, there is nothing very obvious or necessary about any particular conclusions which an astrologer might infer. There are many possible interpretations which an "expert" might provide to a client and it is here that the "art" of astrology comes out.
Sometimes, the promotion of astrology as an art has to be done in conjunction with the denigration of science as a principle. The argument seems to be that scientists, being too logical, are unable to see astrology for what it really is. For example, J. West and J. Toonder have written in their book "The Case for Astrology":
...an astronomer knows no more about astrology than a radio mechanic knows about music. To ask an astronomer for his "expert" opinion on the subject is useless.
There are no hard and fast rules for interpretation, which means that there is no interpretation which is really "better" or more "objective" than any other. The astrologer improvises and plays things by ear. This is why astrological predictions are generally "better" when they are done with the client right there rather than "blind." This, of course, sounds an awful lot like the methods used for cold readings.
If the astrologer can speak to the client, it is possible to ask probing questions and see immediately any reactions to the developing interpretation. In this fashion, an individual predication can be tailored to the person at hand, taking into account their very real fears, hopes and history. When performing "blind," however, the astrologer has nothing to work on but the data itself and this never seems to provide quite enough for a really accurate or informative series of conclusions.
The wide variety of methods for interpreting astrological data - or even for gathering astrological data - creates a problem for the claim that astrology is genuine or accurate. Astrologer Prudence Jones admitted as much in the Astrological Journal in 1996:
Even within astrology, our various systems don't agree either. In horary astrology the Moon's north node is a point of ill-fortune, but in humanistic astrology it is the direction of personal growth. A planet may be in Cancer in sidereal astrology but in Leo in tropical astrology. Serious astrologers often decry Sun-sign forecasts as some sort of unfounded gibberish, but Sun-sign techniques (turning the chart, transits to "turned" house rulers, lunations in "turned" houses etc.) are in fact part and parcel of standard astrological method. The rules of traditional, modern (post-Theosophical), sidereal, and local space astrology (with its sidereal ancestor Vastu-Shastra) are quite different. Yet how many of us have decided that we would be tropicalists rather than siderealists, traditional rather than modern astrologers (or vice versa) after any process of sober reasoning?
One final note with regards to the distinction between art and science needs to be emphasized: whichever paradigm is chosen for astrology, that will determine the ways in which astrology is to be explained, justified and defended. If astrologers try to claim that their work is scientific, their work will have to be evaluated on strictly scientific terms; if it fails, then so does their program.
On the other hand, if astrologers openly admit that their work has nothing really to do with science and is instead a subtle psychological and interpersonal art, then matters change considerably. So long as astrologers no longer claim to be making empirical and verifiable statements, then strict scientific scrutiny would no longer be appropriate. Instead, astrology would have to be evaluated in terms of how well it serves individual clients, both psychologically and emotionally.
