Imagine two thinkers in a conversation, let's call them Nhay and Hany, Hany is an areligious believer in skepticism who has invested a lot of time building a Popperian framework (the idea that truth can only be approached through falsifiability, through rigorous testing and the elimination of what fails.), the other, Hany, is a Pentecostal Christian and a practicing scientist. His world is built on two intertwined structures: the empirical rigor of science and the faith-driven logic of Christian theology.
Both Hany and Nhay sit for an hour-long exchange. Hany introduces the logic of Popperism, how perceptions of truth are shaped by the art of conjectures and refutations. In turn, Nhay listens, tests, and explores. In turn, Hany listens to Nhay’s thought world; one rooted in revelation, lived experience, and a layered metaphysics of purpose.
By the end of the conversation, something curious happens, Nhay leaves with new tools, new methods for testing ideas. But Hany leaves with something more disorienting: an awareness that his own framework was not as transparent as he thought.
What did Hany discover?
He realized that even a system designed to minimize assumptions hides one of its own. If truth is only meaningful when it can be falsified, then isn't falsifiability itself an unfalsifiable axiom?
And if it is, then Popperism stands not as a transparent method, but as a belief system, one that silently grants falsifiability a privileged position. It's a philosophy pretending not to be one. This is the paradox of all our thought models, the clearer and more self-critical they seem, the more invisible their deepest foundations become.
With all the aforementioned, it begs for this question, what makes a transparent thought model?
Transparency should not be mistaken for simplicity or openness to critique. It's about awareness of the lenses we use, their flaws and their strengths. A thought model is transparent when it knows it is a model: when its structure, boundaries and the axioms are visible to the user.
The moment we confuse our model for reality, we lose transparency and we become servants of the very system of thought we once built to serve us. There always exists hidden layers of thinking that don't emerge from neutral reason, they are inherited, chosen, or believed. And so, even our skepticism is an act of faith in the rules we've chosen to believe.