A lot of people don’t trust scientists. I think that’s because a lot of people just find them frustrating. It’s understandable, if you think about it: Have you ever tried to convince some skeptical friend of something that you know is true, only to have all of your intense feelings of rightness and sensibility written off as completely irrelevant?

Scientists are worse. Convincing a scientist of something is really, really hard. Especially for non-scientists, since we lack the years of training that go into teaching scientists how to sift that very special stuff called “evidence” from the piles stuff that isn’t. If you’re absolutely sure that what you believe is true, when someone else refuses to be convinced by your conviction, it’s hard to take, sometimes. “I feel very strongly about this! Isn’t that good enough to convince you?”

But, as fallible, vain, and stubborn as individual scientists can be, they work in a system that, so far, is the only system of thought that humans have developed that does a pretty good job of ameliorating those factors. It’s not perfect, of course, but the scientific method—crude as it is—has produced some pretty marvelous results. You don’t have to believe in it for it to work. Penicillin doesn’t require faith in order to be effective.

That’s not to say that what scientists choose to investigate, or the way that they frame their results isn’t influenced by cultural bias. But, when scientists get something really wrong, other scientists can prove that the other guy or gal didn’t get the facts right, even if it takes a couple of hundred years. Because, in the end, it all gets put to the test.