Belief systems. When something is not in your sensory environment, and not in your experiential history, you are relying on a belief of what might happen - like, will our crops get rain next week?

To illustrate, you might enjoy Joseph Henrich's example of how the Ilahita tribe of Papua New Guinea was able to expand their tribe size beyond the Dunbar number (>300 people). In their case, having a large enough tribe to battle neighboring tribes was a matter of survival against an existential threat. (11:20 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmpSwbtWopM)

What's interesting in the scenario presented was the tribe expanded their religion to a dual moeity system. This introduced new rituals and gods that helped the tribe form economic, social and emotional bonds - ultimately allowing the tribe to expand in size.

Its an example of how _belief_ in gods that are contradictory to our modern science provided an organizational fitness function to combat their environment.

I'd imagine very few people actually interpret their world through a scientific belief system. Further, what some consider scientific, might not fit the belief system of others who are more rigorous. The lack of widely accepted model for beliefs based on _scientific thinking_ might be the scariest part of our society today. Personally, I blame the short-comings of our language as it is not well suited to communicate scientific knowledge efficiently (ie, for 3rd grade readers) and without ambiguity.