“One glance through the telescope,” admits the book Astrology​—The Celestial Mirror, “and a whole cosmology was blown away. . . . Astrology was cast out by the rising authority of scientific reason.”

Is It Scientific?

The sun no longer rises with Scorpio during October. Over the centuries, the earth’s relationship to the constellations has gradually altered. Now during October the sun instead moves into the constellation of Libra (Latin for “scales”), which is said to confer qualities such as charm and ease. Quite different from Scorpio!

While Eastern astrologers have kept up-to-date with these celestial changes, most of their Western colleagues have not. They thus base their predictions on a heavenly scheme that is some 2,000 years old! Regarding this, Drs. H. J. Eysenck and D. K. B. Nias state: “If Western astrologers are right in making any particular interpretation, Eastern astrologers are wrong, and vice versa. Yet both sides claim to be extremely successful!”

This alone sheds much doubt on the reliability of astrology. In addition, one psychologist examined the marriage and divorce records of 3,456 couples. Did the compatibility of their astrological signs have any bearing upon the success or failure of their marriages? According to Science 84 magazine: “Incompatible signs got married​—and divorced—​as often as the compatible ones.”

Astrologers counter by saying that the sun sign, on its own, is of little significance and must be considered together with planetary influences. But this also creates problems because the Babylonians believed in the influence of only five planetary gods​—Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. The telescope, however, has revealed three more​—Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto. This has caused confusion among astrologers. “Some astrologers,” writes Louis MacNeice in his book Astrology, “made these an excuse for the inaccuracies of their predecessors; but others . . . argued that these new planets could not influence human beings because they could not be seen with the naked eye.” Most Eastern astrologers therefore ignore the distant planets. Western astrologers, though, attach great significance to them.

The time selected as the basis for a horoscope also raises questions. Most astrologers use the moment of birth. But the law of genetics says that hereditary traits are passed on to offspring at conception, not at birth. According to the book Astrology: Science or Superstition?, the ancient astrologer Ptolemy “neatly side-stepped this by claiming that birth will be under the same constellation as reigned at the time of conception, although there is in fact no reason at all to suppose that it is.”

Scientists React

Many scientists have therefore become alarmed at the growing acceptance of astrology. In 1975, 19 Nobel prize winners, together with other scientists, issued a manifesto entitled: “Objections to Astrology​—A Statement by 192 Leading Scientists.” It declared:

“In ancient times people . . . looked upon celestial objects as abodes or omens of the Gods and thus intimately connected with events here on earth; they had no concept of the vast distances from the earth to the planets and stars. Now that these distances can and have been calculated, we can see how infinitesimally small are the gravitational and other effects produced by the distant planets and the far more distant stars. It is simply a mistake to imagine that the forces exerted by stars and planets at the moment of birth can in any way shape our futures.”