"The Destruction of the World Trade Center: Why the Official Account Cannot Be True"

The Destruction of the World Trade Center:
Why the Official Account Cannot Be True
An Address by David Ray Griffin

Table of Contents

* The Collapse of the Twin Towers
* Testimonies about Explosions and Related Phenomena
in the 9/11 Oral Histories
* Implications
* Other Suspicious Facts
* The Collapse of Building 7
* Conclusion

excerpt:

The Collapse of the Twin Towers

Shortly after 9/11, President Bush advised people not to tolerate "outrageous conspiracy theories about the attacks of 11 September." Philip Zelikow, who directed the work of the 9/11 Commission, has likewise warned against "outrageous conspiracy theories." What do these men mean by this expression? They cannot mean that we should reject all conspiracy theories about 9/11, because the government's own account is a conspiracy theory, with the conspirators all being members of al-Qaeda. They mean only that we should reject outrageous theories.

But what distinguishes an outrageous theory from a non-outrageous one? This is one of the central questions in the philosophy of science. When confronted by rival theories---let's say Neo-Darwinian Evolution and Intelligent Design---scientists and philosophers of science ask which theory is better and why. The mark of a good theory is that it can explain, in a coherent way, all or at least most of the relevant facts and is not contradicted by any of them. A bad theory is one that is contradicted by some of the relevant facts. An outrageous theory would be one that is contradicted by virtually all the relevant facts.