From our perspective, however, there is good reason to include the 17th century in this period. The Enlightenment is generally thought to have ended with the French Revolution or the end of the 18th century. Despite its rejection of Church authority, the Age of Enlightenment was not an age of atheism. Falsifiability, as developed by Karl Popper, is the core doctrine of modern scientific method. In this doctrine, scientific knowledge accumulates by deducing and hypotheses from a well organized theory and conducting experiments to test the hypotheses.
Theories vary in their potential for falsification.
Some theories support the deduction of many varied testable hypotheses while others do not. Our confidence in a theory is proportional to its potential.