The distinction made between belief and knowledge is largely an artificial one, as is the distinction made between imagination and reason. It first became clear in my mind that those are largely artificial distinctions through reading the early and eminent computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum who pointed out that literally every aspect of human thinking that could be articulated as knowledge had its origin in acts of belief, the choice to believe things. That belief starts in early childhood as the child chooses to believe what they see and later, what they hear and who knows when they choose to believe what is their wider experience. I have come to understand that the all of that belief requires acts of imagination, of creating ideas for testing and that the very act of reason was an act of imagination. Mathematics depends on considering discrete objects in combination, measuring things according to standards that exist nowhere in nature but only within human imagination, when those measurements are standardized, in the consensus of many imaginations who choose to accept the standard of measure. Many Americans refuse to choose to accept the standard of measure thought up as the metric system, one consequence, I'm convinced of that is that the clumsy English system makes it harder for Americans to understand a range of things.
I think one of the consequences of failing to acknowledge reality about the artificial distinctions between belief and knowledge, imagination and reason is that some of those who love to believe their thinking is done within a framing that guarantees that it produces the most ridiculous of all of those types of distinctions, objective as opposed to subjective knowledge. The proud belief of so many "skeptics" "realists" really atheists of the materialist and scientistic type that they have left behind inferior modes of thought based in belief and imagination and subjectivity is an illusion. That illusion can be a product of training in the STEM subjects but I think its presence among so many who are demonstrably ignorant of those topics first hand, who could't balance a simple linear equation requiring a modest level of sophistication shows that it can be adopted out of ignorance for other reasons. That's the kind of Team Science fandom among those who are about as accomplished in science as most always out of shape, never could have made the team football fans or basketball star fantasists. Clearly, their faith in their side is not based in knowledge, it isn't based in reason, it's not objective, it's a choice on the basis of imagined certainty that is't known to them, it is chosen out of subjective preference.
Something similar can be present in even very accomplished scientists who have what is always and inevitably a very partial knowledge of the vast field which comprises even any individual science. The necessity of belief in science goes from everything from a belief that other scientists have done the rigorous work to make what they claim reliable - no one can do or replicate all of that rigorous work to convince themselves of that reliability by empirical experience. It can't even meet the non-empirical standard of pure reason in mathematics. I once asked one of the most accomplished mathematicians I've ever known, who specialized in pure mathematics what they thought about Andrew Weil's proof of Fermat's famous Last Theorem, she said that since her area of specialty was in a very different branch of mathematics she knew as little about it as most people. I realized later at least she knew enough to be able to locate the branch of mathematics that she'd need to know in order to understand it.
I think when you put all of that into the framing of materialist monism, the actual faith of most of the sci-based materialist atheists, it produces a kind of faith that can be extremely deceptive and is susceptible to a denied subjective self delusion of reliability apart from any empirical observation, That can be disastrous. It is also capable of getting wannabee sci-rangers to support it for entirely non-scientific reasons divorced from any actual desire to have an accurate idea of nature.
Since engaging skeptically with the ideology of atheism I've encountered explicit or unstated, maybe even unconscious insistence that something which is totally unfounded in observation MUST BE TRUE because materialism was the actual nature of reality, that something MUST BE THERE or COULDN'T BE THERE because of nothing but their preferred framing that they insist must be used to consider experience and thought and which mandates a whole series of beliefs and acts of imagination that they insist must be knowledge because it is a product of and a support of their preferred framing. I think multiverse theory is the quintessential current example of that in cosmology and physics, natural selection is the perpetual one on biology and I think the accusation that they are primarily a product of extra-scientific desires, especially for the promotion of materialist-scientistic atheism is entirely supported by the very claims and statements of those who invented those and who maintain them. They are inevitably a product of human imagination instead of empirical observation of nature, any scientific conclusion that is based in statistics and probability is inevitably the product of imagination, many of the most involved methods of statistical analysis actually include more impacts of imagination. All of the acts of imagination and choice and preference that are part of data collection, all of the decisions to throw out "outliers" etc. the choices of how to do the data collection and the range of what is considered will be part of any product of the process involved. It is easier to come to what can be practically considered to constitute absolute certainty in much of history than it is in many of what are considered to be the exact sciences, it is seldom achievable in the "soft" sciences. There is no science that is "softer" than natural selection which is an ideological framing which cannot be tested in nature to do what it is claimed it does, produce new species. The existence of different, closely related species is claimed to prove natural selection is what produced them when there is no observation to support the claim that that is what produced the differences.
The nature of those sciences as the product of imagination combined with the illusion of them being within the framing of objective knowledge has had the effect of sometimes producing some of the most undisciplined and fantastic of claims which are then claimed to have scientific validity. That claimed validity is often explicitly or implicitly stated, because "it must be so" or "it's more Darwinistic" or, most revealing of its origins in ideological preference, that it's more supportive of atheism or more vulnerable to religious implication or, especially when it's Darwinism, that it's more in line with what Darwin said 160 years ago, is a certain sign of its actual character.
Multiverse theory has a shorter history of use in ideological warfare and has a smaller faith community within the relevant sciences than natural selection has built up over the last hundred sixty years and whatever else can be said against multiverse theory, it doesn't support class inequality, scientific racism and the economic interests of the upper and upper middle class, so people don't generally encounter the irrational anger at its questioning that is almost inevitable when someone gets from the educated population when they express doubts about the reality of natural selection. That polemical use of natural selection even among those who have full faith in its reality has also been a constant feature of the history of the idea. In the post-war period, especially in the Sociobiology wars starting in the mid 1970s that war among atheist-Darwinists against others has reached the angry fury of rival sects of Baptists or Marxists or American or, perhaps even British football fans. Daniel Dennett, mentioned yesterday, can get really ridiculous when his anger is against his fellow atheists and Darwinists and materialists, Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Lewontin and Noam Chomsky. It's not uncommon, like Communists or members of closely related fundamentalist sects, to aim their angriest fury against their nearest rivals. Natural selection doesn't seem to work in that divergence of species. Fitness of the ideas have nothing to do with it. I suspect that if it were able to study that history within just biology it would not turn out that the people with the most careful observation of nature and most rigorous methodology and reason do not necessarily win out in the short run. As we watch evo-psy get scrapped, which I fully believe it will be, we should consider that biological inheritance is a really bad framing for understanding that phenomenon. It's more like fashion and fandom than knowledge and reason. And "memes". Really "memes".
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