Astrology...a science?

      I acutely remember that when the earthquake hit Gujarat and devastated the entire villages and towns, I had often read in news papers that such and such astrologer had forecast the disaster in such and such daily. That this kind of claims are largely entertained by Indian people,it is evident by the huge success of astrologers like Bejan Daruwala and others. People are so eager to know about their future that huge attention has been paid to the sms schemes of the cellphone companies which delivers daily horoscopes from the expert astrologers. I, myself does not have any faith in astrology and often I fall into the debate with the people believing the otherwise. I have come across various arguments in favor of the astrology, many of them can be easily discarded with a little effort but some are hard to answer. First and foremost the conspicuous fact is that the entire supposed science of astrology is based upon the belief that the earth is the center the universe, but that according to proponents does not falsify the veracity of astrology because by that way even the Indian calender system is based upon the same conception of earth. Then there is the most eloquent of all arguments, they say astrology had been a well developed science in ancient times(of course in India), But now-a-day due to the invasion of foreign rules the knowledge about that ancient science has faded away and what remains is the present vague form of astrology, so on the basis of that vague science we can't predict anything exactly. These kind of arguments are very hard to counter because the other person is giving the evidences which can not be disproved. At a first thought this statement seems true because Indians were fond of not doing any documentation of whatsoever was worthwhile. Ancient Indian civilization was not like Romanian or Greek which had documented too many things. But given an afterthought these kind of defense does not have any value. Suppose that the ancient Indians had a well established science of astrology, now it can be assumed that at least few noble men like today's scientists were the masters of astrology and thus were able to predict every event including floods,disasters, external invasion in advance. Then why those omniscient masters could not help save their land from external invasion like mughal?, why the masters could not prevent the the deterioration of their science of astrology? So many good or bad things can be done if you know the future, but so far as we know the history nothing that much extraordinary happened. Now the proponents again will argue that there must have been a purpose in their mind to let the history being shaped like what we see it now and we don't know that purpose for the same reason we don't know about astrology. There is no limit to this kind of debate because the context is history and a life long prejudice.

     At the firmest of my belief I can say that astrology is just a mix of probability and a guess work using common sense. So astrology is as much a science as any good guess work can be or any seasoned stockbroker's forecasting can be.