(Pretty much a cut/paste from a facebook post of mine. Yes, this is what I do on facebook. Apart from feeling jealous of other people's vacations, that is)
This is how astrology started: people always asked 'why' questions. But nature/life is brutal - there are no easy answers, and many times there are *no* answers. But the human brain being wired to find patterns, started noticing patterns in events. These were mere coincidences: like when this planet was rising, this king died; when that comet appeared, there was a famine. etc. This was not stupid - this was the state of the art at that time. Sometimes this kind of pattern matching worked - like in predicting weather. But most of the time it was mere correlation (with a modestly positive R) mixed with human frailties of selective memory, confirmation bias etc. that led to such false beliefs getting entrenched.
This knowledge, which was indeed acquired by the best minds of the time, after meticulous observations and sometimes amazing mathematical feats, got codified as the rules of astrology (panjangams, shasthras etc. in Hindu culture).
But knowledge moves on. Every new generation has smart minds. (Seriously - even among the millennials!) New facts and better patterns are uncovered, and occasionally fundamental pieces of understanding emerge. When this happens, the old knowledge has to be thrown away. It's no longer valid, however dear to us.
Here is where many people stumble. No matter how venerable the old scholars were, they were wrong in many things about nature. We now know better.
To be clear, just because I know about the latest scientific theories, am I smarter than Aryabhata or Aristotle? Absolutely not. They were giants of human thought. But if I cling on to a geo-centric theory of the universe because those great ancestors of ours believed that, then I am indeed stupid.
