Article February 2, 1974 Issue

Fixed Fate or Fixed Principle?

JOHN A. GRANT

A few years ago Time magazine featured an article, "Astrology and the New Cult of the Occult." It ended with the following conclusion: "But there are many troubled people who refuse to accept personal responsibility for their lives, insisting that some outer force is in control. For these, a first-class astrologer can seem a necessity—and perhaps he is."^{Time, March 21, 1969;}

How this contrasts with the teachings of the Bible, which speaks of man's God-given dominion and our individual responsibility to act in obedience to God's law! We read that when Moses was urging the children of Israel to obey the Ten Commandments, he warned them, "Take ye therefore good heed unto yourselves ... lest thou lift up thine eyes unto heaven, and when thou seest the sun, and the moon, and the stars, even all the host of heaven, shouldest be driven to worship them, and serve them."^{Deut. 4:15, 19;} This makes it unmistakable that astrology violates the first commandment, "Thou shalt have no other gods before me."^{Ex. 20:3;}

The basic claim of astrology is the superstitious importance placed on the exact moment of birth, which is supposed to put one in a particular relationship to the fixed and orderly pattern of movement of the stars and planets. It suggests that everyone has a fixed fate determined by a mysteriously operating astrological "law" whose effects he cannot possibly escape. This, in turn, has produced through the centuries a vast accumulation of superstitions having an aura of pseudoscientific respectability. Hence the widespread appeal astrology has on college campuses today as an intriguing and imaginative exercise of the human intellect.

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