Hello, all.

I just wrote a little ditty on Augustine's disproof of astrology. I'd say it's a pretty clear cut argument.

Basically, there are cases where two people are born at the same time. This means that, if their lives are determined by the position of the stars at their birth, then they will have the same kind of life. In these cases, they didn't. So, astrology isn't true.

Another version of this argument that he puts forth is that of twins. Twins are born of the same mother, in some cases at almost exactly the same time (like Jacob and Esau). Yet they live very different lives! (like Jacob and Esau)

I am actually curious what the justification is for people who do ascribe to horoscopes. I can sort of understand the ancients believing in it, because they thought stars were self-moving movers. In other words, they thought they had souls. I think they thought this becuase there was no apparent cause for the regular motion of the heavens. This is because they thought the cause had to be present to the caused at all times. Anyway, if stars had souls I'd be more willing to believe they could influence things because soulish things have greater capacities for activity than non-soulish things. I hear tell some people still think stars have souls, but I haven't heard the arguments to support it, and obviously we can't accept the account that they demonstrate regular motion in the same way the ancients did, since the galaxy isn't earth-centered.

The other neat argument I read today in Augustine is about Genesis.

Basically, the argument is that for God to have created everything from nothing, it must not have been with a voice like the voice He spoke in the gospel "This is my son with whom I am well pleased" or with the voice like the one with which He spoke to Moses. Because, for His voice to be heard, it would have to be temporal, and time didn't exist until after He had spoken.

Which means that those Words must have been eternal in Him. And this corroborates John 1, in which it says about Jesus, "And the world was made through Him." Awesome, huh? The other thing he argues is that, in this read of Genesis, Beginning means the Word, which is nice because it seems to free us from temporal confusion, "What does in the beginning mean?, etc". So you could read Genesis this way:

"In the Word, God created the Heavens and the Earth."

It makes sense to me.