Weare at war with an ancient enemy: an enemy without country, an enemy so pervasive that it is with us at all hours of the day, everyday and will continue to undermine our quest for meaning and continual survival for as long as we live.
We must understand  although the enemy has grown weaker over the centuries, it cannot be destroyed — only beaten down.  So it must be ferociously and bravely challenged at all times lest it plunge modern civilization into a realm of unthinking able depths.  Unfortunately, that task is complicated by virtue of the enemy’s many guises: ambiguity, inexperience, absolutism, misinformation, disinformation, the unknown and the unknowable.
That enemy is ignorance, and it amounts to so much more than a void in knowledge, for we humans are not simply data storage devices, but mortal beings with desires and needs. Grossly put, our behavior — our actions and inactions — is a function of our beliefs, our biological imperatives and to what degree they are met.  All else being equal, belief is the most relevant issue since is possible for one to believe in false premises.
Paradoxically, belief does not begin with the individual, though the propagation of belief occurs between individuals.  It is here that need and desire play their role.  An individual or group may spread disinformation for its own gain or it may spread misinformation because it believes it to be true. The recipients may come to believe because of a satisfactory congruency with already held beliefs or the individual may reject the disinformation/misinformation because he or she is more knowledgable.  The impact of believing in a lie, whether intentional or not, will depend on its nature.
The salient question now becomes, “what should we believe and why?”
Here enters science.  Through systematic observations of the natural world, scientists — the practitioners of science — endeavor to formulate laws that are either universal or conditionally applicable.  This knowledge may then be organized further into a set of theories which attempt to explain the causal connections between and of observed phenomena.  However, before a widely-accepted theory of nature can be crafted, scientists must start with a hypothesis. 
A hypothesis is born out of a question and is a supposition based on limited knowledge, though it serves as a starting point for further inquiry.  The path from hypothesis to theory is treacherous at first and foremost it is required to be falsifiable in order to be deemed scientifically relevant.  If it is falsifiable, the hypothetical claim may be demonstrated as false along the way — the end of its journey. Afterwards, the hypothesis may well have to contend with independently verifiable experimentation, possible paradigm-shift, unscientific beliefs and ignorance — both realized and unrealized.
Despite the rigor of science, it is not a method of obtaining absolute knowledge. Rather, it can be thought of as a way of obtaining “approximate knowledge.”  Moreover, a scientific theory does not state, “this is the way nature is,” but it states, “this is the way nature goes.” In this way, science can be thought of as a self-correcting method of obtaining descriptive models of nature.
One of the greatest examples of science’s self-correcting ability is the case of gravitational phenomena. In 1687, Sir Isaac Newton’s Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy was published. “Standing on the shoulders of giants,” he detailed a theory of universal gravitation and his famous three laws of motion.  His work was so effective that it was not adequately challenged until more than two centuries later with Einstein’s general theory of relativity.  In this way, science led human understanding to a model of gravity that more accurately described observed phenomena.
The human species as a whole has greatly benefited from science: sturdier homes, medicine, airplanes, rockets, the Internet, etc.  We could look more closely at the impact of scientific illiteracy on the individual basis, especially where issues scientific converge with public policy.  It is my sincere hope that by way of deeper scientific understanding, humanity shall together ramp up its war on ignorance, and in so doing, further limit strife, misery and war around the world.
Christopher Ramos is a graduate student in the Department of Physics and Astronomy. He can be contacted at [email protected].