I’d say that “certainty” is usually something produced (evaluated) subconsciously, especially when we are talking about the sense of certainty seemingly held by many young kids or when we think about how most of us feel about “the sense of reality” of physical material and all other seemingly solid/persistent/reliable things that be have some sort of “trust”.
I mean, young kids are not sure because they did scientific experiment about all things nor did they think logically to conclude and to become certain.
“Certainty” is (more or less) normal state for them.
Similarly, when we feel and treat/presume that something as “real”, I think it’s more often because of innate trust/belief we have about the matter.
Although there are things we learn to have the trust, they are generally simple things or their trustworthiness is usually taken for granted once learned and we have the certainty about them somewhat “automatically” when we recall them or use them.
And IF we loose the associated/automatic/subconscious sense of certainty about something, somehow, it’s likely to induce the state of doubt/uneasiness that may bother us a lot and push us into questioning (as someone was suggesting).
However, I do think we tend to question the basis/validity/reliability of things we take for granted (if we are curious or if we are concerned about accuracy/precision/etc) and that this tendency may lead us to be less certain about many things. This tendency may make some of us (or most of us) uneasy and make us search for the anchor or the base on which we can rebuild generic sense of certainty or something maybe we can call proto-certainty. Religion can be seen as the outcome of this. Some people may use any beliefs like beliefs about physical material “reality”, ideology like communism/democracy, and really anything that can produce basic sense of certainty.
This can be seen or guessed by how some of us go through questioning period(s) and then come out with new (or renewed) belief (and associated certainty) about something, as well as how people react when their (substitute) certainty is questioned by others, directly or indirectly.
For many people, especially if their substituted certainty (beliefs) isn’t very solid, they can be pretty sensitive about maintaining/protecting their fragile certainty and they would feel that they are under attack if they get in contact with someone or some information that do not support their effort in sustaining their somewhat artificial certainty. For them, anything that doesn’t confirm/affirm/agree their certainty is taken as aggression and they may even go into denial mode and or even into victim mentality in which their righteousness/superiority/etc is taken for granted.
However, I also think that it’s possible to have conscious (instead of subconscious) and conditional/limited (instead of absolute/unlimited) sense of certainty that can be compatible to the way we think in our logical part of our mind without relying absolute flavored artificial certainty substitutes.
It is the type of certainty that I have with simple math, etc.
I have (usually conscious) certainty that it’s limited and conditional, and I have (also mostly conscious) certainty with the methodologies and results.
But I don’t call/qualify this type of certainty as “absolute” (or 100%) because they are conditional/limited and they can’t be taken for granted unlike we do with subconscious (and absolute) certainty.
So, I guess we can think about different types of certainty, depending on if they are subconscious or not and if they are well confined/limited/conditional and not “absolute”.
And I think some of us, as we investigate and learn about things, realize that we don’t know much (to the level naive subconscious absolute certainty would allow us to pretend). And it’s not so far away from thinking that we can’t be absolutely certain of anything.
We can observe this kind of tendency among some older people who continue to pursuit something deeper and deeper, including scientists and even among religious people.
But they don’t panic with the lack of absolute certitude because they have already lots of learned (and possibly conscious and conditional) certainty to fill the emotional need to feel sure/certain/safe/reality.