Raison d'etre of the Voynich?

[Mark Knowles]

Supporting evidence: not a lot.

That could almost be a general statement regarding the Voynich manuscript. And would apply to most if not all hypotheses.

only very rarely

Again this would apply to most if not all hypotheses as, of course, the Voynich is a very rare object in and of itself.

we can't decipher it, and this should have been relatively straightforward for an encrypted text

But of course if it were enciphered if we could decipher it then it would cease to be of interest to so many people and therefore this kind of conversation would be much less to occur. It is a very rare object and so it makes sense that if it were an enciphered manuscript then it would be a very rare enciphered manuscript.

2) the general appearance of the writing is not that of an encrypted text

The general appearance could mean visual appearance e.g. style of script characters. I would argue here that there are plenty of the same or similar characters in cipher scripts of the time. On the question of whether the structure of the text is consistent with an encrypted text, I would certainly be happy to see a proof that it is not.

On the subject of the "Supporting evidence" and "Contradicting evidence" approach one could easily end up demonstrating that the Voynich manuscript could not exist. However we know that it does exist and has been dated. However for any hypothesis there is very limited supporting evidence and certainly evidence that might seem to count against that hypothesis.