Why is faith important?

[Esquilax]

No, because you can't understand what is in those journals. You have to trust that someone else has had the experiences. The verification is only possible if you are a scientist. It is no different from following a religion

I feel like I need to point this out: speak for yourself. All you can honestly say is that you cannot understand what is in those journals; depending on the field, I can understand it just fine.

But there's something more: if I wanted to, I could go out into the real world and replicate any experiments discussed in a journal piece, and get the same results. In fact, it's a safe bet that the professional scientists are doing exactly that, as part of the peer review process. If I wanted to study it, I could, and in doing so find that it is accurate.

This, of course, is a marked distinction from religion, which operates only within personal experiences that are completely unverifiable and impossible to replicate. What you're talking about isn't faith; it's trust. I have a reasonable level of trust in the publication and the scientists involved in the experiments, but I'm also honest enough to recognize when that trust is misplaced and an error has occurred, and when that happens I no longer count the results of that experiment as factual.

By contrast, religion has an attitude wherein it and its god are always right, all the time, with no possibility of correction or redaction. One learns and changes with the facts, the other demands that the facts change to suit its purposes. That's the difference.