More recently though, it seems to me that ideologies DO have a pretty strong impact on what people believe about the world itself, especially by people who have a tight coupling between their identiy and the ideology.
At the very least, this seems to apply to both sides of the current right/left divide in the west. For instance, if I ask you to predict how climate change will affect the world over the next 300 years, and your response lies in what is predicted by the 5% most optimistic climate scientists, you are very likely to be on the right. On the other hand, if your response corresponds to the 5% most pessimistic, you are very likely to be on the left.
As ideological polarization, an increasingly large part of the population will fall into one of theose extreme groups, which I interpret as a way that the ideology promotes beliefs that are not supported by science.
It seems to me that the underlying motivation is that people who believe axiomatically that a free market is good, see global warming as a threat to that belief. The leftists may believe the opposite because they see the free market as evil, or just to oppose the right.
There are plenty of other cases where ideologies cause beliefs that are not well founded in "real" science, even though there may be plenty of ideologes that promote them. Some beliefs are so sacret that any challenge to them will be punished as evil/heresy, which itself is a clear indication that the ideology does not value open inquiry.
I would even go so far as to see some of the principles and ideas involved as somewhat metaphysical. Capitalists can see the "invisible hand" in such a light, while leftists seem to imagine some sort of oppression to determine every social interaction (not very diffrent from how Christians in Europe believing that demons were virtually everywhere).
In the end, I think it is about the people following a given ideology. It used to be that atheist were a relatively small minority composed of mostly people with an above-average level of scepticisim to ways of thinking not supported by hard evidence.
But as the percentage of non-religious people increase, more and more poeple that have a religious inclination become "atheists", and those (I think) may be much more likely to accept incredible (literally) statements as fact, with little or no evidence.
More recently though, it seems to me that ideologies DO have a pretty strong impact on what people believe about the world itself, especially by people who have a tight coupling between their identiy and the ideology.
At the very least, this seems to apply to both sides of the current right/left divide in the west. For instance, if I ask you to predict how climate change will affect the world over the next 300 years, and your response lies in what is predicted by the 5% most optimistic climate scientists, you are very likely to be on the right. On the other hand, if your response corresponds to the 5% most pessimistic, you are very likely to be on the left.
As ideological polarization, an increasingly large part of the population will fall into one of theose extreme groups, which I interpret as a way that the ideology promotes beliefs that are not supported by science.
It seems to me that the underlying motivation is that people who believe axiomatically that a free market is good, see global warming as a threat to that belief. The leftists may believe the opposite because they see the free market as evil, or just to oppose the right.
There are plenty of other cases where ideologies cause beliefs that are not well founded in "real" science, even though there may be plenty of ideologes that promote them. Some beliefs are so sacret that any challenge to them will be punished as evil/heresy, which itself is a clear indication that the ideology does not value open inquiry.
I would even go so far as to see some of the principles and ideas involved as somewhat metaphysical. Capitalists can see the "invisible hand" in such a light, while leftists seem to imagine some sort of oppression to determine every social interaction (not very diffrent from how Christians in Europe believing that demons were virtually everywhere).
In the end, I think it is about the people following a given ideology. It used to be that atheist were a relatively small minority composed of mostly people with an above-average level of scepticisim to ways of thinking not supported by hard evidence.
But as the percentage of non-religious people increase, more and more poeple that have a religious inclination become "atheists", and those (I think) may be much more likely to accept incredible (literally) statements as fact, with little or no evidence.