Volker.Doormann

OK. I see your chart. I can tell you, that I have also Jupiter in 4, Saturn in 3, and Moon in 7.

How do you feel with a transiting Pluto of your natal sun? My sun is exact 180° apart from your sun in 20°10' Gemini. So it is very similar to your situation. Patrick seems to would know about this transformation process of pluto on a major body in a chart. (?)

Best

Volker

Volker.Doormann

That's your fantasy. Where is the proof? What is psychology? A natural science? What is the object? Scientifically? I never have heard, that on have shown by scientific proof of physics, that there is really a psyche. Is the psyche yellow? What is the mass of a psyche? The truth is, that science not can show any proof of a psyche or of a soul.
Show me your ethic, and from what work of science you can state this assertion.

Sorry. There is nothing of any serious scientific proof in your post. It's still fantasy. There is a talking about a psyche like the scientists were talking in 1890 about an ether. People want to know, what is the true nature of ethic. Science can say yes or no, we have knowledge or we pass.

Never mind.

Volker

Volker.Doormann

What do you mean? Whether I do work in techniques? Yes.
doormann.org/physics.htm.

Volker

Jesse

Jesse:
Again, a study of rapes would verify that being raped is correlated with certain changes in behavior or psychology...

Volker:
That's your fantasy. Where is the proof? What is psychology? A natural science? What is the object? Scientifically? I never have heard, that on have shown by scientific proof of physics, that there is really a psyche. Is the psyche yellow? What is the mass of a psyche? The truth is, that science not can show any proof of a psyche or of a soul.

No, I just told you that science only studies empirical things, such as a person's behavior, how they answer questions on a survey about their mood, how extroverted or introverted they are, etc. Are you saying that astrology makes no predictions about these sorts of empirical issues?

Jesse:
.. astrology is not solely about ethical or aesthetic claims ..

Volker:
Show me your ethic, and from what work of science you can state this assertion.

Huh? I just got through saying that science can only study empirical claims, not ethical or aesthetic ones. In case you didn't follow me, my point was just that astrology makes empirical claims too, and these claims can be studied by science. In fact, it seems to me that most astrological predictions are empirical ones like "you will have trouble with relationships" rather than ethical statements like "what you are doing is wrong".

Volker.Doormann

I do not see, what of this nice conversation is science.
Correct, no. Astrology has knowledge about mental structures as natural science has knowledge about natural forces.
Thank you.

Volker

Jesse

Jesse:
I just told you that science only studies empirical things, such as a person's behavior, how they answer questions on a survey about their mood, how extroverted or introverted they are, etc.

Volker:
I do not see, what of this nice conversation is science.

I would say that any attempt to find a correlation between two variables using scientific methods (statistics, controlling for other variables, etc.) is "science". For example, in many cases of newly-discovered medicines we may have very little idea why the medicine helps cure a certain condition, but we can still use large numbers of double-blind trials, analyzed using statistical techniques, to determine that taking the medicine does increase the cure rate.

Jesse:
Are you saying that astrology makes no predictions about these sorts of empirical issues?

Volker:
Correct, no. Astrology has knowledge about mental structures as natural science has knowledge about natural forces.

But astrology's supposed "knowledge about mental structures" is used to make predictions about behavior, which can be investigated empirically. For example, look at your prediction about Patrick:

That sounds like an empirical prediction to me, not an ethical or aesthetic judgement. Suppose we find a large sample of people who were born under a "square of moon and uranus", and an equally large sample of people of similar background who were not born under such planetary conditions. Then, we give them all questionaires about their relationships with others, including questions like "do you have a tendency to cut off relationships abruptly?" To control for possible distorted self-images, we also ask similar questions about the people in our study to their friends and family. Finally, we use statistical analysis to try to see if there are any significant differences in the answers given by the first group and the answers given by the second.

Is this not a scientific investigation of empirical claims made by astrology? If we found a significantly higher rate of cutting off relationships abruptly in the group born under a square of moon and uranus, wouldn't this provide scientific support for astrology? And if we found no such difference, wouldn't this be scientific evidence against it?

Volker.Doormann

I agree.
Great. You hit the point. The problem is, that there merely is no one in your science community, who would do the job, because of social discreditation from the own science community.
It is.
Yes.
Absolute. I do work in science since 33 years. And I do astrology since 40 years. I have made statistical work on divorced couples in 1977 of some 3000 couples with birth data from the local statistical country office. I have checked some 10000 assertions in astrology, and I have found only about 1000 for correct by matching the behavior of that persons. I have personally perceived out of their colored behavior. I have checked some 1000 charts of special people with special fates, like Charles Manson, The Una Bomber, Chess Giants, Math Genies like the gay Wim Klein, who could solve the tenth square of a each number in some minutes with his brain only and was working at CERN as a living computer in the 60ies. I have implemented this personally checked interpretations in a software tool, and there are many replies about the hits that are be analyzed by that software about the self perceived character and mental structure of the born individual. If the community thinks, that this work can be done well on universities, then they can do it. In Germany is running now a study of an Skeptic scientist, named Edgar Wunder, who wrote, that in his present study a significant value of true astrological descriptions are measured and he was some curious about that meta result.

I think it is of a good practice and a good scientific tradition to respect people and argue on the subject. Astrology contains Astronomy, spherical trigonometry, theology, psychology, mythology, symbology, archeology, and experience with the human creature in all deep areas of the psyche. Astrology can analyze but also can help individual to understand the psychic structure in it's causality from prior to birth and it's bad and good tools to be aware of it to master and recognize the of the own self also in relation to others.

It is very easy to checkout astrology by reading the own individual horoscope. There is no need to blame persons because they do astrology.

Thank you.

Volker

Baidarka

Volker:


I don’t think that you are being evasive on purpose but your inability to answer my questions in a way that I can understand is very frustrating.
I understand that Astrology was invented by a bunch of old dead people and that this gives it a certain stamp of authenticity. (as a general contractor who has demolished the work of a lot of old dead guys I can testify that some old dead carpenters did dreadful work) It seems that the fact that Mars has a reddish appearance must have provided dubious testimony to its Martial influence.
In relatively recent years Astronomers and not Astrologists have discovered additional planets in our solar system. Some how modern Astrologists have assigned properties to these bodies.
1) How was this done?
2) Who figured out what properties these newly discovered bodies possess?
3) Was there any controversy within the Astrological community about this?
4) What kind of energy emanates from the heavenly bodies that affect us astrologically?
5) If we are affected by some sort of astrological emanation then experience with radiation, light, gravity, radio waves etc. would lead us to believe that this energy would weaken with distance. Yet you tell us that distance size and composition have no relevance for Astrologers. Why is this? If this is true wouldn’t logic tell us that distant stars should influence us as much as neighboring planets? Why are you not factoring in the most distant stars discovered by Hubble into your calculations?
Please don’t give me a link to some web site where I will not be able to find answers to these very specific questions.
Please try to answer these questions in simple language and in order.


Thank You
Baidarka

Jesse

Jesse:
And if we found no such difference, wouldn't this be scientific evidence against it?

Volker:
Absolute. I do work in science since 33 years. And I do astrology since 40 years. I have made statistical work on divorced couples in 1977 of some 3000 couples with birth data from the local statistical country office. I have checked some 10000 assertions in astrology, and I have found only about 1000 for correct by matching the behavior of that persons. I have personally perceived out of their colored behavior. I have checked some 1000 charts of special people with special fates, like Charles Manson, The Una Bomber, Chess Giants, Math Genies like the gay Wim Klein, who could solve the tenth square of a each number in some minutes with his brain only and was working at CERN as a living computer in the 60ies. I have implemented this personally checked interpretations in a software tool, and there are many replies about the hits that are be analyzed by that software about the self perceived character and mental structure of the born individual. If the community thinks, that this work can be done well on universities, then they can do it. In Germany is running now a study of an Skeptic scientist, named Edgar Wunder, who wrote, that in his present study a significant value of true astrological descriptions are measured and he was some curious about that meta result.

OK, it sounds like we agree that it is possible to test astrology scientifically. Then the only question that remains is whether such tests have been done, and if so what the results were. I've read a few sources that say the results have generally been negative, but I haven't really looked into this carefully.

One note about the kind of tests you mention, though. When testing a new medicine against a placebo, it is important that the test be a "double-blind", that neither the patients recieving the pills nor the doctors giving them know whether an individual pill is real or a placebo, because such knowledge could bias how they react. Similarly, since there's a fair amount of interpretation involved in deducing what a person's astrological chart says about them, if you're going to do a statistical test to see if astrology can predict some trait--say, divorce rates, geniuses vs. criminals, whatever--then it's important that the person analyzing the chart not know anything else about the person in advance, because that could bias his interpretation. If you can get a friend to give you a few hundred charts of divorced and married people, without telling you which is which, and you can use their charts to predict which category they fall into at a rate significantly greater than chance, then you have some good evidence for astrology. But if the test is not "blind" in this way, it's impossible to rule out the possibility of unconscious bias on the part of the astrologer.

I found a link to an article about Edgar Wunder's study which you mentioned:

http://home.arcor.de/p.goemmel/astrology.htm

It seems the results were positive, although I don't know what the statistical significance of the results was (ie the probability that they could have occurred by chance).

Volker.Doormann

Yes. I think the point is only, wheather one is interested to discover or not. No one can grant, whether the result is bullshit or truth. There is nothing to believe in astrology. Also, if there are positve results.

Volker