What is the relationship between astrology and science?

Although at first glance astrology and science appear to be antagonistic there is much that weds these avowed epistemological enemies. Beyond superficial discrepancies, astrology and science are related in that both are fields of knowledge dedicated at finding universals and that both were originally motivated by the will to know. Secondly, science and astrology are empirical; both use methods of observation grounded in studying the physical universe. In theory, science as pure method and astrology as a body of knowledge are not antagonistic but mutually enhancing. However, as philosophers of science such as Paul Feyerabend and Thomas Kuhn have revealed, science de jure and science de facto are two different animals, and it is science—a worldview and philosophy that sees the external, physical world as foundational and yet contingent, devoid of purpose, completely ordered and mechanistic, and understood in full by quantitative analysis—that is hostile to the claims and philosophical underpinnings of astrology.

Science "as is" is not an epistemology of meaning or value but a knowledge of utility; it seeks to "explain" and "describe", and most importantly to "control" and "master" but not to truly understand or know in a final, ultimate sense. Accuracy, replicablity, and parsimony, or simplicity, take precedence over the real search for Truth. Through science, we live in what Lewis Mumford calls a "disqualified universe," a universe where qualities, subjective experience, moods, impressions, and experiences are locked in our heads, unexpressed, private, and of no value—nuisances that merely create unwanted static on the radar screen of pure reason and logic.

Astrology, however, is a science of qualities; astrology is a wedding of external observation and the acknowledgement of the subtlety of internal states, reducing neither to the other and holding both as valid fields of information. From the viewpoint of astrology, then, ambiguity and subtlety of lived experience is not to be reduced, made quantifiable, or ignored but to be seen as existing in reciprocal relationship and enhanced, in terms of understanding, by the observation and study of external events.

Science as a methodology is not exclusive to the foundations and way of knowing of astrology, and, in fact, pure science is now beginning to deconstruct the fundamental philosophical assumptions of classical science from the inside out. Twentieth century science, which ushered in the fields of quantum mechanics, chaos theory, complexity, and relativity theory presents a portrait of the universe which is supportive of the astrological worldview: observer and observed are in dynamic and coupled relationship; objectivity, in a unadulterated sense is untenable; there is an interdependence of all phenomena; information is nonlocal; and the foundational stuff of the universe is not matter but waves, patterns, and fields.

Thus, science is not at all antagonistic to the assumptions and methods of astrology, only the philosophical assumptions that created the greatest epistemology of utility—classical science—is in stark contrast to the premises and suppositions of astrology. As more sophisticated experimental designs, modes of value and perception continue to be challenge and evolve, and as science becomes more capable of handling the ambiguity, nuances, and subtlety of life, then reconciliation between and science and astrology can begin.