So, Astrology

OK, surround all this with some hand-waving words like 'probably' and 'it seems that' and 'according to modern cosmology'. I'm not really prepared to commit to asserting as fact that the physical world even exists, let alone that it behaves in particular ways, but let's leave such arcana aside for the time being.

Suppose astrology were true. The constellations are made up of bodies which are extremely massive, have extremely high momentum, and are to all intents and purposes imperturbable. They're also extremely far away, and light from them takes several lifetimes to get here. Now, of course, you could argue that 'constellations' here merely stand in for arcs of the sky. That kind of doesn't matter because the next ring in is the planets, which are also very massive and effectively imperturbable. Their orbits are set; they do not, cannot, and will not change for anything we can do. The position Jupiter would be in at moment I was born could very possibly have been calculated by people in Mesopotamia 5,000 years ago - and assuming their maths were good enough (which I think they were) they'd have got the answer right.

So if the position of Jupiter influences my character, then my character was determined 5,000 years (and, in fact, far longer) before I was born. And if you want to say well, no, actually it's not Jupiter itself, its a fundamental rhythm of the cosmos which just happens to coincide with the orbit of Jupiter, that really doesn't make any difference. We're still saying that people's characters and what will happen to them are predetermined so far in advance that it is, in human terms, infinite.

Now, of course, it's entirely possible that we live in a clockwork universe (well, it is if you disregard quantum theory - and I have to admit the maths of quantum theory are a bit beyond me, so I can't verify it). It's entirely possible that everything is in fact completely predetermined and that our perception of free will is simply an illusion.

But if that is so, we drop straight into my own specialist area, which is epistemology: how the heck do we know the details of how the recurring cycles affect human fate? At some level it's not surprising if there's a crude association between people's life chances and the season of their birth. Particularly in primitive agrarian communities, a spring baby is going to do an awful lot better than an autumn one, and that will be reflected in their growth, their health and most likely their outlook. But, how do we know? Who kept the records? Where are they now?

When you get into finer granularity, into predictions based on the positions of the moon or planets, then the data becomes vastly more complex to collate, and vastly more complex to interpret. It doesn't mean it can't be true. It doesn't even mean that somewhere, over the past 5,000 years, the records could not have been kept and collated. But, where? Where are they? If they don't exist, then there are two other possibilities: some all-wise god handed them down on tablets of stone or panels of beaten gold or whatever the medium of choice is these days for style-conscious eternal deities (in which case where are /those/); or else, it's a load of what we philosophers tend to refer to as bollocks and codswallop.

So that deals with the epistemology, and so we come to the final argument, which is the aesthetic one. It's completely not impossible that the universe is entirely clockwork, entirely predetermined; that the astrologers of ancient Babylon could in principle have predicted every coma and semi-colon in this diatribe I'm writing this evening.

But.

But.

Wouldn't that be boring? Would you really like to live in a universe where I couldn't suddenly write about the pleasures of marmalade sandwiches, and the piquancy of orange peel? I want to live in a universe in which crazy things, random things, beautiful things can just happen - in a universe where the watchmaker is not merely blind, but completely crazy. Perhaps I don't. Perhaps, somewhere on a broken clay tablet crushed under the tracks of an American tank parked on the ruins of Babylon, some future archaeologist will one day decipher the text '...ouldn't sudden... he pleasu... marm.. lad...'

It isn't impossible. It completely isn't impossible. But as I said, do you want to live in that universe? I don't. And, furthermore, if I do live in that universe, then the fact that I have the moon and Jupiter both in Scorpio means that I don't believe it.