With regard to "faith-based", everything we know has a certain amount of
faith in it. Any reasoning has starting assumptions. I can't PROVE that
what I see with my eyes is really there and that my whole life hasn't
been a hallucination. It is a starting assumption I must make to decide
what to do with the information coming to my eyes. However, the
assumption that what I see is really there has been a very fruitful
assumption over the years, so I have a high level of trust in it.
Physics starts with an assumption that there is a real world outside of
myself, and it obeys logical principles that can be described
mathematically. Einstein pointed out, “The most incomprehensible thing
about the world is that it is comprehensible.” That is not a trivial
assumption, if one notes how little of human history that has been held.
However, it has been an extremely fruitful starting assumption, so we
tend to forget the amount of “faith” involved. The atheist scientist
starts by assuming that physical universe—all that exist—obeys
mathematical principles. The Christian scientist could start with an
assumption of an unchanging God who created an universe that follows
orderly principles. Both arrive at the universe being governed by
logical principles that science seeks to understand, so you can’t use
science to distinguish between them. The Christian scientist, however,
could be comfortable with the idea that a God who established and
enforces natural laws might on occasion decide to suspend them for
special situations. Any such events, by definition, would be
‘supernatural’ and beyond the scope that normal science could evaluate.
There might be methods from other disciplines that might be able to
evaluate those (e.g. historical analysis), but no experiment I can
design could test those claims. All knowledge, is founded on untestable
starting assumptions; we can only distinguish them on the reasonableness
of those assumptions (on which we may not agree), logical consistancy of
the body of knowledge and how fruitful it is in describing the world.