Science seeks to understand situations and phenomena by utilizing testable and experimental mechanisms to come up with an inference. It is, however, important to understand that there are times when science becomes a hard option to utilize in explaining something. Ideologies, on the other hand, are ideas that are used to describe or explain some of the things that science does not have a way of been experimentally explained. This means that science, although it is objective will sometimes be surpassed by ideologies, and individuals may think that idealism is superior to science.
Governments are some of the sources of funding for research carried out by researchers and therefore they will sometime manipulate science for ideologies which have more impact on the people and the government rather than maintaining results brought about by research. A Bush administration appointee misinterpreted research by Turner concerning sexuality that gave reasons why unmarried people should not have sex.
This was not the initial purpose of the research and neither were the results congruent to what the appointee claimed but the ideology she created from the research made her point for the government and she even succeeded in getting an appointment as the head of family planning program.
Ideologies are easier to adopt than science since they involve following beliefs and assumptions even when there are some obvious challenges. Science, on the other hand, does not make assumptions and neither does it focus its arguments on beliefs but results and outcomes from experiments and defined variables. This difference makes individuals favor ideologies over science because they are easier to understand than it is with scientific reports and evidence.
The reason there are so many ideologies such as sexism, racism, homophobia, and classism is that ideologies can be twisted by governments and organizations funding a certain project so that the results of the research will be favorable to the organization and the government. Unfortunately, science cannot be manipulated in this manner as it depends on data and logic to make an inference. This means that before a scientific statement of an issue is made, it has to be evaluated and analyzed including the effects of other factors to determine its validity, and hence, even when some particular scientists may be manipulated to make false statements, they are prone to disqualification by other similar studies on the same issue.
Some people have defined ideology as a science of ideas while others claim it is an idea of science. Whatever the correct definition of the term is, it remains to be a very contradicting issue because it has been used by many to discredit science or manipulated to sideline what science proposes. Thomas Jefferson wrote that individuals could be trusted with their governments if they had information. Unfortunately, people are not well informed on many issues partly because they do not wish to shake off the assumptions they take in life and partly because their governments do everything possible to deny people information, so that they may not succeed in attaining what Jefferson visualized.
This is a clear indication that people, as well as the governments, play a great role in sustaining ideologies against science. As a result, science remains to be seen as inferior to ideologies. However, the bottom line remains, ideology is science while science is not an ideology.