eThoughts : Free to not Think?

I recently received some information about an organization called the Freethinkers. The email I received was about the criteria for what to believe. The author wrote about the importance of falsifiability. No thought or concept is acceptable if it can’t be falsified. Hence, rigorous science is about the only thing that will generate knowledge.

All right, I’m steeped in behavioral science and I know something about this. Skipping past all the parts that are subject to criticism about science, determinism, empirical evidence, and cause and effect, the idea of falsifiability is an interesting one.

The general idea is that one takes a hypothesis and attempts to prove it wrong by scientific principles (objectivity and empirical evidence). If one cannot prove it wrong, then the hypothesis is accepted, for the time being anyway.

The same principle is supposedly applied in law. One cannot be both innocent and guilty of a particular crime. The law supposedly makes an assumption that one is innocent unless proven guilty. So, in order to prove innocence, we try to prove guilt (through empirical evidence). If we can’t prove the guilt, than innocence is accepted.

The problems are vast indeed, both legally and scientifically (especially when one heads off trying to prove a hypothesis instead of trying to prove its opposite). But the issue that most bothers me nowadays (again) is about thinking to begin with.

It seems