Buckle up. You might find in reference to other comments about what happens if I invite people in for 'a debate'.
The angels know, for a fact, God exists. They have seen Him with their own eyes. Faith is not required.
Mankind has never seen God. Every single element of God's will is demonstrated, such as it is, through hearsay, conjecture and rumour. Mankind has only Faith to guide him to God. And mankind is thus presented with a choice: the choice to believe, or to deny, God.
You can get into the theological implications of whether the choice is valid readily enough; believe in God well enough and be rewarded with eternity in heaven, fail to believe adequately and spend an eternity somewhere between limbo and hell. But you can choose to follow the doctrine or not, you can choose to embrace or reject it. Jury is out on deathbed pledges and conversions, or final redemption after a lifetime of sin.
Historically, of course, failure to believe could be marked with charges of heresy, being banished, or straight up murdered if you didn't follow the correct doctrine (see Europe in the 1500s for the march of the Spanish Inquisition or the trials throughout England during that time depending on whether the sitting monarch was Catholic or Protestant), which somewhat removes the 'choice' factor but strip it back to what is taught and what the Bible actually says, and you realise that it is a choice.
Why do I say that?
Well, the various tribes within Christianity all believe in the same god. (So do several other major religions, but we'll let that slide for now.) They can't all be correct, because several of them are fairly contradictory on key points. How do you choose which is correct? At some point you have to make a *choice* on that front because the differences aren't going sway you on the basis of faith per se. Either you hold that scripture alone, justification through faith alone, etc. or you don't and instead you believe that good deeds are required alongside adequate faith are required for ascension. And you have no guidance beyond what the different factions argue, with the same overarching outcomes; thus you must pick a path. Including, by definition, the path that leads you away from all of these.
And, of course, you cannot manifest true belief if you hold doubt, which gets you into the whole theological debate over the concept of the tests of faith. As depicted, God knows if you've led a pure life, why the tests of faith? Some suggest that it is Satan pushing those in the guise of God but even that isn't structurally sound if examined as a claim. As laid down, failure to embrace the salvation of Christ isn't to be lured to the devil, it's a false equivalence (though there is a time when Satan was let loose 'to deceive', but even that doesn't talk about persuading people away from Christ, that only talks about setting nations against each other, which certainly breaks some of the other covenants, but none to the exclusion of redemption through Christ), but in any event we'll come back to how much belief is required in a minute.
In the meantime, if you take Revelation 20 at face value: one that enters Heaven has their name written in the book of life, where the deeds of your life are examined. It makes no claims that belief in God or expiation through Christ is a prerequisite, merely that the deeds of life are checked. If your name is not in the book of life, into the lake of fire you go - but it's not actually clear what constitutes your name being in the book, or not. You have to get to Revelation 21:8 - "But as for the cowards, unbelievers, detestable persons, murderers, the sexually immoral, and those who practice magic spells, idol worshipers, and all those who lie" - before anything is cited, and then the question is 'what is an unbeliever'.
Is that belief in God? Is that belief in the infinite salvation through expiation via Christ? These are not equivalent. Moreover, we already know a (significant) number unbelievers are not in Hell, because they had no ability to choose in the matter; we infer they are in Purgatory because they cannot have chosen to believe with a full heart in God because they were born before Christ came to redeem them through his sacrifice.
So unbelief cannot, unilaterally, be a ticket to the lake of fire. It is also not clear why cowards specifically are singled out; fear and inaction are not top tier anything, neither violations of the commandments, nor ticking any of the major sins. Do note that the list of commandments does not agree with this list of those destined for hell, which also begs the question of what other sins might be transgressive enough for the lake of fire, and what are not.
Which means we're back to how much belief is enough belief, doubt and the significance of free will. The angels saw first hand the consequences for not following His rules. You can argue that this is not strictly the choice of free will here, because it's not clear if Hell existed prior to this decision; it's almost implied that it did not, meaning that choosing to disobey without knowing the consequences for that disobedience limits the ability to regard it as a *choice*. This is God saying to Satan, "do it or, or, or... I'll think of something" (though I will concede this is possibly the one prideful act Satan does make, he does it anyway, knowing that the consequences aren't known and basically implies daring God to do something about it, but it's not the choice itself, it's the fact that it has to be an intentionally uninformed choice)
Humans on the other hand don't have any of this certainty. They're told a story and essentially asked to base consequential decisions of their life on that story - and as far as they know, it's only a story. Any 'glory of the works of God' is pure inference off the back of the story. (Romans 1:20 would have you consider otherwise, that God's works are a testament to God and that is sufficient evidence of God's existence such that even those who had never heard of God must automatically believe in his existence, but that's a logical fallacy big enough to drive an ark through it.) So you have to make a choice, at some point in your life, whether you agree with any of this or not. And as you go through life, more things will happen to you that will present you with that same choice. Those events will either sway you or reaffirm your prior decisions.
But they're decisions to make, choices where the outcome in either direction is rumoured and otherwise unknown. You have to roll the dice and make the best decision you can. Some will of course argue that this is 'the temptation of the devil', but it isn't. It can only be temptation if the devil offers you something that the opposite outcome doesn't. God offers you 'believe or burn', the devil offers you... nothing?
Let me ground it in my own personal view now, rather than continuing to argue through a tapestry. I believe the Judeo-Christian god does not exist (atheist, as opposed to 'I don't believe God exists', an absence thus agnosticism). I believe very firmly through everything I have seen that there is no metaphysical lake of fire waiting for me. Why? Because that's the choice God gave me. Hear me out.
God made the Angels; His existence is certain to them. What does God have to gain in giving humanity the choice to reject Him out of hand? What angle does God have in letting me completely reject his existence?
God has not presented Himself to me in my life in any fashion in which I am consciously aware; I am to understand and infer that all of the works of humanity are ultimately works of God. If that were truly so, it would imply the ubiquity of God throughout existence, and that humanity would be innately certain of it. If He exists, I am by that same defintion a manifestation of His will. His will, then, manifested the ability to ask questions, to consider and weigh the evidence one way or the other, and to come to a position of belief (as opposed to merely an opinion) that He does not exist. The alternative theory is that God isn't real and I just... arrived at that logical conclusion by myself.
That's a choice I can look at completely on its own merits. And I can choose either path according to the attributes I have - which, presumably God gave me. Thus He gave me the ability to not only choose not to believe, but to rationalise it to the best of the *other* abilities I have.
Note that I am not trying to convince you that my view is correct; I am quite prepared to arrive at the white throne and be tossed into the lake of fire come Judgement Day, and I will do so knowing full well that I have used whatever I was given to come to a conclusion and make a decision about how I should live my life. Give me the tools to assess my situation and I will do just that. Can't be mad about the consequences if that happens.
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