...ike Carl Hempel and Ernest Nagel regard a theory as scientific if it is hypothetico-deductive. To them, scientific theories are sets of inter-relate... ...r-related because a minimum number of axioms and hypotheses yield, in an inexorable deductive sequence, everything else known in the field the theor... ...ith breadth, width, and profundity, such as Darwin's theory of evolution - are not deductively integrated and are very difficult to test (falsify) ... ... scientific activity. Alleged connections that cannot be captured in these nets of reasoning are cast out either as "hypothetical" or as "false". I... ...erse is partial to life, not indifferent to it. All four are forms of teleological reasoning (that nature has a purpose) masquerading as eutaxiolog... ...ical accounts are possible. What happens when we try to apply the same teleological reasoning to the system as a whole, to the Universe itself? In t... ...h as the electron or dark matter) derive their meaning from their place in complex deductive systems of empirically-testable theorems. Ethicists re... ... have been the first to offer this simplistic formulation of the Logical (a-priori, deductive) Problem of Evil, later expounded on by David Hume in ...