Is Astrology a Science, a pseudoscience or just plain Bunk?

The other day, while I was surfing the net, I came to a discussion on "Is Astrology a Science?".  In this article were comments by philosophers, cosmologists, psychologists and many other men of science.   And most of them if not all of them took the position that there was nothing of interest or validity in Astrology as a science.  But is that true?

Science depends on observation and correlation.  And then the mind takes over and organizes these facts into a pattern which can be measured and repeated from anywhere on this earth.  The repeated observation, correlation and conclusion is what makes the 'experiment' a scientific law.  We are, to this day,  trying to prove Einstein wrong.  But Relativity still rules.

Now let us look at the case for Astrology as a science.  From a time of long ago, the shepards tending their flocks were probably the first observers of the stars in the night sky.  And they noticed the fact that some stars always appeared at the same place night after night.  Others of the 'stars' seemed to move from night to night and they were called 'wanderers' or later on planets.  But the movement of these wanderers was a regularly observable phenomenon and later on their path could be predicted with great accuracy.  This was easy in the case of the Sun and the Moon but the other planets were much more difficult.  The original others were of course Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn.  The advent of the telescope added Uranus, Neptune and Pluto.  So we have observation of a consistent pattern of things.  Now we need correlation of these observable facts.  This we do by first assigning names to the planets as gods in most cases, i.e Jupiter, Saturn and the like.  To the fixed stars which represent the signs of the Zodiac we assign the names of animals or perhaps even human functions like Virgo, Gemini etc..  And to the Houses of the Horoscope we just assign numbers.   I did not intend to make this a class in Astrology but merely to show how these parameters are reproducible, measurable and knowable in a language that could be a useful tool for us to understand complex things such as human character and behavior.

So far I have shown that the Scientist and the Astrologer approach things in virtually the same way when dealing with complexity.  And perhaps next time we can look at some other comparisons that might allow us to say something about the applicability of these two tools of the mind.