This is not true at all, and the responses in this thread can verify that. Especially the ones that say I should be wiped from the gene pool because I don't believe in the broader sense of evolution. The argument you make that "religious" somehow know more because of their faith is wrong. For instance if you believe in the big bang theory as the source of how the universe started, how is that not equivalent to believing that God created the universe? They both require the same type of faith, just in a different source. This scenario has nothing to do about knowledge, but everything to do with faith. I will tell you that I believe God created the universe, because He revealed that to me in His word. You may claim this to be "special knowledge" but to me it is not necessarily knowledge but faith in God. Just as there is no true knowledge in the big bang theory, it's just a scientific guess. What you have there is faith in the scientific community to answer one of the big questions of life, not knowledge. You can explain both like some kind of knowledge but they are in fact not knowledge at all, but faiths.
The responses in this thread weren't made by scientists except those made by Mokele (if there are other scientists here, my apologies for not being aware), and I seriously doubt the gene pool comment was made by a disciplined skeptic, whoever it was.
This whole faith argument is an infamous one and it's the fundamental problem addressed by epistemology, and I'd highly recommend doing some study in it outside of this thread. But I'll say a few things on it here.
It's hard to really do justice to the definitions of and differences between belief and knowledge in a single forum post, but I will say that belief will often tend to emerge in a top-down way (making the conclusion first) whereas knowledge will tend to emerge in a bottom-up way (it follows naturally from the evidence). Belief is speculative, preemptive, and is often confused with knowledge by the person holding the belief. Belief seems to arise from a natural aversion to uncertainty in humankind rather than arising from reason.
Many religious people will say they merely "believe" or "have faith" in something, but then their actions will suggest that they internally treat those beliefs as knowledge. Someone who engineers his entire life around the desires or instructions of a possible deity as any very religious person might is not merely being speculative. But he has convinced himself that it's just a "belief" because that seems to provide him with a level of intellectual protection when he argues those beliefs to others. If he admits that he treats the beliefs as knowledge then he opens himself up to rational critique.
Faith in the big bang and faith in a deity are two very different things, and even those philosophers who say that nothing is truly knowable will agree that there are still "degrees" of knowability.
The big bang theory was developed from the bottom up. It's based in evidence. It's subject to change in the face of new evidence (anyone who can demonstrate why the theory is faulty would win a Nobel Prize). The big bang theory thrives even amidst the open examination of alternative ideas. So, though not perfectly provable (I can't even perfectly prove that I exist), it has a reasonably high degree of knowability... enough that we can successfully operate on it until future evidence shows up. It bravely floats in that place between ignorance and certainty that humans find so abhorrent.
The notion of a deity was developed from the top down. It's based in anthropomorphization and desire. We don't have evidence that necessarily leads to a deity, and most arguments for a deity (e.g. intelligent design) don't actually argue a deity... they argue against the absence of a "first cause" (of some sort) while saying absolutely nothing about the characteristics of the first cause (making the arguments as substantial as the "anyone but Bush" arguments for any political candidate of the last election). The notion of a deity is not subject to change in the face of new evidence. The open examination of alternative ideas is discouraged by those who hold the notion (show me the equivalent of a Nobel Prize awarded by any Christian organization for conclusive evidence against genesis, the flood, etc). The notion of a deity is the result of jumping ahead in an attempt to avoid that dark, uncertain, abhorrent void. After all, there are many possible explanations for all the things people attribute to a deity, but I've never met a theist who is all that interested in what they might be (someone taking a bottom up approach would find those explanations utterly fascinating).
So the assertion that the two are just the same kind of faith is borne out of a false dichotomy... the position that something must either be truth or faith with nothing in between. When degrees of knowability are applied, the big bang theory (and the other forms of scientific faith that you mentioned) and the notion of a deity can barely be compared. Bottom-up vs. top-down makes all the difference.
That last statement might seem to contradict the last statement of my previous post, but it was really that dichotomy that I was addressing. If a deity is declared to be unknowable, then the person making the declaration cannot also claim to know the deity in any way. If the deity is admitted to have degrees of knowability, then we can start evaluating that deity using logic and evidence.