A recent article suggested that religious more than political leanings determined people's attitudes towards some controversial 'scientific' issues. The data in the linked article from the Post would suggest that it depends on the particular issue.
Dan Pink spent a couple chapters on this in Drive. These are polysci arguments, not psychological arguments; it's actually pretty simple. People root for sports teams, they don't root for one player and against another. Ideology is the same way: the makeup of a platform becomes something you accept more or less whole, which is why they're debated so stringently. Attempting to believe in one aspect of a common platform but not another causes cognitive dissonance. It has nothing to do with reason and everything to do with mutual affinity and tribalism.
This is why people can believe in the damage CFCs do to the ozone layer, how they can accept acid rain as a fact, how they can fully understand "the greenhouse effect" but vehemently deny anthropocentric global warming. It's also how people can believe fully in evolution, adamantly support space exploration but also believe that vaccines cause autism. It isn't at all about science or its application, it's about sports boosterism. Fans of Penn State had a much more nuanced attitude about Jerry Sandusky, for example.