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Prof. Moody, if weak falsification is as powerful as strong, in what sense is it weak? You say: in the sense that the hypothesis is still consistent with the facts about the falsifying observations. Here is the crucial flaw in your argument for the distinction. The facts about our observations of the computer guts are also consistent with it being run by etch-a-sketch, as well as with it being run by magic! "It is run by etch-a-sketch" is logically consistent with "I seem to observe its parts and find no etch-a-sketch". The reason is that the falsity of the magic hypothesis, which you take as merely weakly falsified, you assume when you conclude that the etch-a-sketch hypothesis is strongly falsified. For our observations of computer guts could be a magic trick to hide the etch-a-sketch. Or, we may have failed to recognize the parts as indeed an etch-a-sketch not because of magic, but because we didn't realize that some etch-a-sketches are built with the parts we did observe, or our procedures of examination were flawed: dirty microscope lens, failure of each lab assistant to describe his observation properly, etc. As I've been arguing, any putative case of weak falsification can be redescribed as strong, and vice versa. The underlying reason for this is that observations are never inconsistent with any hypothesis. All they can do is reduce that hypothesis's probability to near zero. That water never boils is a hypothesis you'd say is strongly falsified, but we can also describe its falsification as weak: magic tricks fool us when we seem to see it boil, or a weird bubble phenomenon yet undiscovered by scientists is what causes the bubbling of hot water, when in fact water, uniquely among liquids, cannot boil. Idle speculation, perhaps, but so is the hypothesis that a magician causes our experience of the computer idle speculation. Heck, the earth could still be flat if some weird effects caused us to have weird observations: a weird curvature of space making it look round. Any hypothesis is consistent with any statements about any observations, except statements which beg the question by saying "I observed that there was no etch-a-sketch" or "I observed that the earth was round." In that sense of "observed that," we have indeed observed that magic does not run computers and that life is not the product of design, just as well.

: -- Jim Ryan, philosophy prof., Huron College (posted 2/13, 12:40 p.m., U.S. Eastern time)

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