I am open to disagreement and discussion.
Please note this is largely based on my own observation on how many many people act.
Some groups (creationists, for example) frame “scientists” as this lying monolith that have some reason to lie about the fossil record or carbon dating. Or “scientists say the earth is a globe and you’re supposed to believe it because science said so”. Framing an enormous group of varying fields and millions of people as this evil machine results in actual major phenomena like vaccine hesitancy or distrust of institutions.
It’s not uncommon for me to come across a debate where one party will cite a study, and the second party will completely disregard said study because “it’s from academia and can’t be trusted”.
It is a fairly common misconception to be skeptic of the idea of evolution as a whole because of skepticism of abiogenesis. While those two ideas are different, creationist groups will conflate and mix them while all the while saying “this is the Satanic science religion that says God isn’t real and evolution is God”.
Or people becoming allured to the idea of flat earth because they utterly misunderstood something like “how can water stick to a ball” or “the moon lander sure looks made of tinfoil” or simple distrust.
And that’s the core principle: “experts cannot be trusted”. People will trust a random stranger on the internet over someone dedicating decades of their life for vaccine research, or a flat earth meme over an entire organization of people whose sole job is getting things in space. Arguing with them simply doesn’t work because many ask things that you can’t provide.
Such trap questions include:
“Show me an experiment where a monkey evolves into a human. If you can’t, evolution is fake”.
“Show me water sticking to a ball. If you can’t build a planet-sized gravitational experiment, the earth must be flat”.
Of course, to us that is fallacious reasoning but so many people genuinely believe this is a valid way to argue.
The desired evidence for both sides is not balanced. There is no peer-reviewed study, independent or not, that proves demons are real - however, lots of people genuinely believe demons are real and demons do bad things. On the other hand, there is a mountain of studies on how vaccines save lives, but they can be disregarded.
Contrary to what lots would claim, people don’t believe things because “science said so!”, though that is a common framing. The premise is desiring proof, and evaluating proof requires more thinking than just “science said so, God fake evolution good”. I can weigh all the proof and evidence, and determine on my own - without anyone telling me what to think - that, for example, the earth is a globe. There’s lots just like me who seriously considered all possibilities for these things and found personal confirmation that the experts are, in fact, correct.