I'm not sure if reality really exists independent of our perceptions of it... sure, there's this wide thing out there called the world that we look at and extrapolate based on, but what is it if it isn't our perceptions? Note that I didn't use the word belief in my argument, I was talking about raw views of it, improved as time goes on.
Besides all the denial of scientific discovery that's evident that I could be using as proof here, reality is not what webelieve, but the verified, continually updated collective mental model we have of it (scientific). It's possible to draw a line of best fit and say this is probably real, but we don't know if what our metrics are measuring is actually "reality".