On 10/3/06, jthorn65 at sbcglobal.net <jthorn65 at sbcglobal.net> wrote:
> You write "reading tea
> leaves has nothing to do with it" meaning botany, as if reading tea leaves explained something else.
>
> You do point out that Jerry, not you, was the source of the original comparison claiming astrology offered any
> explanatory ability.
>
> John Thornton
On the (non) "explanatory" powers of astrology---
I want to argue with my left-rationalist friends in a different way than I once argued with my friends who believed in astrology. And I want to do it in a way that is similar to my arguments about "9/11 conspiracy stories."
I have said that I believe that astrology is a superstition of sorts. But I also believe that most of what we believe (my self included) are some compact of superstition, illusion, self-deception, and biologically misleading conclusions. Intellectuals are generally even more deluded than the rest because they think of themselves as so very skeptical and beyond illusions. ( Socrates discovery of why the oracle called him wise and why those who knew so much were not wise at all could be applied to most of us who are educated. )
As I said in a parallel thread, from what we can gather from scientific explanations and theoretical models, the idea that the current models of astrology (and there are hundreds) can somehow provide us with a psychological-astronomical confluence in such a way as to predict or describe individual behavior is highly unlikely. But that is about all that I can say. It is a negative statement about what is likely and unlikely and about how certain I can be given how little we all know, and how much we delude ourselves about what we do know.
But who knows. Maybe astrology is getting at a deeper truth that we don't yet understand.
Up until a few years ago we thought that we knew a good portion of what we had to know about matter and energy in order to begin to understand most of the universe. Now we know that we don't know anything about 95% of the universe -- dark matter and dark energy. Most physicists I know of actually find this exciting, even invigorating. They are excited by all that they don't know. If only most people (including astrologists) would take that attitude.
So who is to say that there is some quantum effects of dark matter/energy through- out the universe that change our personalities.
I doubt it but I wont discount it.
But here is the deeper truth that astrology might be getting at. In a beautiful phrase Carl Sagan once said that we are 'star stuff made conscious.' The two groups of people who I have met who felt deeply connected to the cosmos as a whole have been cosmologists and astrologists. I think that cosmology is a better pursuit for those who want to feel connected to the world and that there is something irrational in a belief in astrology in this day and age. But just because the belief is irrational does not mean it is wholly wrong in all that it seeks.
What I am suggesting is that astrology is almost certainly wrong in its denotation -- its model of the astronomical-human personality confluence -- but it may be correct in some of its connotations -- its belief that we are connected to the cosmos in some way and that way should be honored. Blake said - "Everything possible to be believed is an image of truth". I think this is an adequate statement of a good starting point for thought about beliefs we do not accept. The question is of course what kind of image of truth is astrology?
Jerry