The gravitational forces are tiny at the distances the planets are from each other. If you're standing next to someone, they have way more gravitational impact on you than if Jupiter is at its closest orbital point to the earth. Planets aligned means nothing and has basically zero impact on the planet.
There are, however, absolutely enormous electromagnetic flows between the sun and the planets, between the planets themselves, and between the sun and the helisophere. These currents are barely understood, even today (mainstream science insists on referring to them with terms like "wind" and "magnetic field lines", and all but dismisses any wider implications of such current flows), but they have observable impacts. Venus's magnetotail stretches out well past earth's orbit and interacts with earth's magnetosphere on a regular basis; earth's magnetotail likewise interacts with the moon and with mars when they align. In combination, they can reach as far as Jupiter. The sun itself has a connection to earth through what are called birkeland currents (named for the man who proposed and then discovered them); the gas giants have similar connections to their moons, and are connected to the sun in turn. They all interact with one another in ways that we have only barely begun to study, but we do now know that there appears to be a similar, galaxy-wide network of "strings" and "streamers" along which stars are distributed and along which planetary nebulae tend to be aligned, which leads one to infer that these electromagnetic flows are a universal feature, rather than something unique to our solar system.
Even if you set all that aside, there's also barycentric motion to consider. The planets don't orbit the sun, but orbit a gravitational barycentre along with the sun. It is close to to the centre of the sun, but it moves around, primarily under the influence of Jupiter (which carries the majority of the angular momentum of the solar system). The movement of that barycentre and the consequent changes in tital stress constantly mixes up the sun's guts on a fairly predictable cycle. The tidal forces the gas giants exert on the inner plants are relatively small, but they are also significant.
Anyone dismissing the possibility of alignments causing planetary effects is almost certainly wrong, simply because there's so much we misunderstand, so we don't know, and a great deal that we aren't even aware we don't know.
Proud of you.
