First of all, your main claim, that everyone believes things on faith is true in a much more mundane way. Most of what people believe about the world is based on faith. Some people believe fat is healthy to eat, others think it is not. Most of the people who have strong opinions on this have nothing to go on but their faith in the authors of various books and articles, or faith in the FDA or health organizations. Both sides would claim there is evidence on their side, but none of the evidence is irrefutable, and the evidence comes from the same sources, so again you fall back on faith in the people presenting the evidence, and telling you how to evaluate the evidence.

Most of what we think we know works this way in dietary health, history, politics, psychology, ethics, and many other areas. There are relatively few fields like medicine or engineering where the practitioners can actually demonstrate the correctness of their theories by successes that are public and valuable (a mind reader might have successes that are public, but his successes are so trivial that it is more plausible that he has found some way to fake it).

So this conceit that some atheists express--that they only believe what can be proven--is obviously and trivially false. It is not possible to function in a social setting without faith. Without faith you would never believe anything and never know how to act.

The additional difficulty that you allude to, that materialist atheists trust their senses to tell them how the world really is, is a deeper and more subtle philosophical problem. Most of the ones you encounter turn out to be naïve materialists. This is not intended as an insult; "naïve realism" is a term used in philosophy to describe a sort of realism about the physical world that is not based on any sort of analysis; you just believe what you see. The problems with this view are so serious that almost no one who is philosophically sophisticated believes it these days.

There is a more sophisticated form of materialism called indirect realism that philosophically sophisticated atheists appeal to, but even this view has serious problems.

Now given that all forms of materialism have serious problems, is it correct to say that believing in materialism is a form of faith? Only if you are using the usual atheist straw-man idea of what faith is. Yes, if you think that faith is believing something that you have no evidence for, then materialism is a matter of faith because there can't possibly be evidence for a metaphysical view of matter.

However, that isn't how religious people use the word faith. Faith is just an old word for trust. It means you trust someone. When Christians talk about believing by faith, it means they trust the writers of scripture and they trust all of the copyists and translators who have passed the scripture down to them, and they trust their religious leaders to tell them the truth, and most of all, they trust God. It isn't that they have no evidence; it's that they recognize that the evidence is not conclusive, but they have chosen to trust, in exactly the same way that a knowledgeable person might know that the evidence on fat is not conclusive but choses to trust the FDA anyway.

First of all, your main claim, that everyone believes things on faith is true in a much more mundane way. Most of what people believe about the world is based on faith. Some people believe fat is healthy to eat, others think it is not. Most of the people who have strong opinions on this have nothing to go on but their faith in the authors of various books and articles, or faith in the FDA or health organizations. Both sides would claim there is evidence on their side, but none of the evidence is irrefutable, and the evidence comes from the same sources, so again you fall back on faith in the people presenting the evidence, and telling you how to evaluate the evidence.

Most of what we think we know works this way in dietary health, history, politics, psychology, ethics, and many other areas. There are relatively few fields like medicine or engineering where the practitioners can actually demonstrate the correctness of their theories by successes that are public and valuable (a mind reader might have successes that are public, but his successes are so trivial that it is more plausible that he has found some way to fake it).

So this conceit that some atheists express--that they only believe what can be proven--is obviously and trivially false. It is not possible to function in a social setting without faith. Without faith you would never believe anything and never know how to act.

The additional difficulty that you allude to, that materialist atheists trust their senses to tell them how the world really is, is a deeper and more subtle philosophical problem. Most of the ones you encounter turn out to be naïve materialists. This is not intended as an insult; "naïve realism" is a term used in philosophy to describe a sort of realism about the physical world that is not based on any sort of analysis; you just believe what you see. The problems with this view are so serious that almost no one who is philosophically sophisticated believes it these days.

There is a more sophisticated form of materialism called indirect realism that philosophically sophisticated atheists appeal to, but even this view has serious problems.

Now given that all forms of materialism have serious problems, is it correct to say that believing in materialism is a form of faith? Only if you are using the usual atheist straw-man idea of what faith is. Yes, if you think that faith is believing something that you have no evidence for, then materialism is a matter of faith because there can't possibly be evidence for a metaphysical view of matter.

However, that isn't how religious people use the word faith. Faith is just an old word for trust. It means you trust someone. When Christians talk about believing by faith, it means they trust the writers of scripture and they trust all of the copyists and translators who have passed the scripture down to them, and they trust their religious leaders to tell them the truth, and most of all, they trust God. It isn't that they have no evidence; it's that they recognize that the evidence is not conclusive, but they have chosen to trust, in exactly the same way that a knowledgeable person might know that the evidence on fat is not conclusive but choses to trust the FDA anyway.

So, materialists are not really believing materialism by faith the way that Christians believe in God by faith. They aren't relying on the testimony of someone who claims to have received revelation. No one claims to have special revelation in the materialist camp, so they don't even have the evidence of testimony. Materialism is a pure assumption, an axiom, without any grounding.