Watch a lot of movies, read a lot of books, and you'll decide that all scientifically-minded individuals are 1.) geeks, 2.) sociopathic would-be tyrants or 3.) both.

I don't know who started this nonsense. There are some undertones of it in Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein; but an anti-intellectual wave goes at least as far back as whoever decided the then-current Babylonian myth of a serpent bringing knowledge to the world would make good propaganda if the serpent were turned into a bad guy.

(Yup, I'm talking about the Garden of Eden. Just like the idea of an adversary to God, that Tree of Knowledge thing was picked up from another culture and adapted to fit their needs.)

Anyway, I think this sort of thinking is unrealistic. Most scientists are interested in knowledge, yes, but I'd like to think that more than just a handful have consciences.

After some of Einstein's theories went towards the making of the atomic bomb, he is purported to have said that if he'd been given the foresight to know what would come of his work, "I would have become a watchmaker." Robert Oppenheimer's comment was "I have become the destroyer of worlds," comparing himself to an old Hindu deity.

Science is our best shot at learning the true nature of our world, as I've discussed in a previous essay. It's also our best shot at getting ourselves out of some of the messes we have created by our shortsightedness.

It took scientists to notice the hole in the ozone layer. It took even more scientists to figure out what was causing it. And it took a whole lot of scientists to alert the public to the danger of CFCs and why they should give a damn about them.

Similarly, the greenhouse effect has been figured out by scientists. And ways to slow it down have also been figured out. It's a matter of getting people to listen to what people with degrees in these subjects say -- not Rush Limbaugh and his ilk spreading the lie that global warming is a hoax.

How, though, can scientists get the respect that they need -- the respect that might help them save our lives -- if we think of them all as eggheads, people with no social lives, intellectuals with no grounding in reality.

If we're willing to listen, scientists have a lot to tell us. Did you know that humans share 99.4% of our active genes with chimapanzees? Did you know that the atmosphere of Titan drops organic compounds to the surface? Did you know that Mars had an atmosphere similar to ours just 4 billion years ago?

I learned all this from one book -- Billions and Billions, the final book Carl Sagan authored before his death. The next thing I have on my list (outside of class assignments) is Eight Little Piggies by Stephen Jay Gould, an evolutionary biologist who is also a skilled essayist.

The solutions to many of our most pressing problems will come from the scientific community and other secularists. The religious community may pick up the ball and help out, but oftentimes they stand in the way. A few fights where religion needs to switch sides, in my opinion, are:

The discipline of science is structured to weed out error -- if an idea is wrong, that error is found out, because every idea is tested over and over again before declared to be true. (Religion rarely admits its errors.) So if they're telling us to be wary of something, we ought to listen up.

We ignore the evidence at our peril.

God is Dead -- Now What?