I was riding into town on Thursday with my neighbor, a microbiologist, who spent the whole trip lamenting how his computer network had gone down the day before, costing him untold time and frustration. "Mercury retrograde," I said with a shrug. "I know you don't believe in astrology, but this is exactly the kind of thing that happens when Mercury goes retrograde." He left the following day on a month-long trip to the other side of the world, with arrival and return through Heathrow. As much as I wish him a smooth and safe trip, I suspect he's going to encounter more than a few glitches with luggage, hotel reservations, and equipment. Not that this sort of thing would convince a committed skeptic, especially one who has the wrong idea of what astrology really is. I recently ran across this pretty good definition in a book by Nick Campion and Steve Eddy: Astrology rests on two premises. One is that, as the entire universe is interconnected, one part can be examined to shed light on another even when the connections are not apparent.
The other is that a certain time possesses a certain quality. Therefore, by looking at the patterns of the stars and planets at any one moment, the astrologer makes deductions about life on Earth at the corresponding times. We live in a universe governed, shaped, and ruled by possibilities and probabilities so it would be helpful if we had a map of all the possibilities.
It would be helpful to be able to see the all bends and curves, the contours of potential, to know what lies up ahead, what lies around the corner, and to know the best path to take.
It would be helpful to understand the shape of all possibilities well enough to answer profound but basic questions, such as, why does the possible realm place such limits on what happens in time? Why does it allow such wonder? Why is the probable world so beautiful and exquisitely systematic and orderly, rather than pure chaos? Where are probabilities guiding us? What is certain in the future, if anything?
