faith itself is not a fallacious concept -- we are not omniscient creatures. putting one foot in front of the other every day are little acts of faith: faith that the ground is there as our eyes perceive it, faith that there are no hazards or pitfalls that could kill us. faith is a necessary transactional element of consciousness and our exceedingly finite capacity to know and experience our world as our limited senses permit. it is not a huge cognitive leap from the little faiths that move us through our day to the big ones of religion.
I am not ruling out the existence of faith in our day to day lives but I think you are magnifying it a bit too much.
What you are talking about is also called inductive and deductive reasoning. for example:
Premise: The sun has risen in the east every morning up until now.
Conclusion: The sun will also rise in the east tomorrow.
The same can be said about taking footsteps, you are not being blind folded and pushed down a step of stairs, your decisions are educated and come from previous observations and trials, you have learned to do this through observations, cause and effect reasoning and comparative reasoning among other kinds of reasoning.
You see others do it when you are a kid, you attempt practicing it when your legs are strong enough to hold your weight, and most importantly you see the evidence and the results, something that you don't do when it comes to faith in a God.
Faith might sound a little bit more poetic but its not faith that makes us walk and put one foot in front of the other, its our reasoning abilities combined with the necessity and the reward of doing so.
you can never know that your next step will not be your last -- that the ground will NOT dissolve underfoot. you can be
assured of it, of course, but that is faith: assurance, not perfect certainty.
faith is reasoning based on faulty or imperfect data, interpreted to impart a sense of security around the immediately unknowable. what we experience -- the data we accumulate through living -- will always be imperfect and flawed, because it is derived through our limited senses and perceptions, as well as our limited ability to interpret our own past through recall. (after all, it is very hard to scientifically test and verify for what has already occurred, and upon those precepts we attempt to move forward in our lives.)
faith is not a foolish thing when properly applied. it is an acknowledgment of the unknowable and of our own limitations, but that we must move forward nonetheless, assuming where we cannot verify. it is not foolish when it is used in a practical capacity -- to impel us forward believing that the sun will rise, we are still employed at our jobs, our family is still there, and the world has not dramatically changed from the previous day. if we lived every day under the assumption that the future *is* immediately unknowable -- which is actually is -- we would be paralyzed. faith becomes foolish when it does not examine the sum of one's senses and experience, or when it does not examine alternatives, and operates on an irrational base, such as "i am told by many people that the christian god is real, and i feel very strongly that he must be because of a specific moment in my life," which demonstrates a faith predicated not on observable patterns and/or self-knowledge (the function that corrects and averages the sum of our experience) but on social memetics and (often willful) self-ignorance.
that said, the wisdom of the atheist or the agnostic comes NOT from the reverence of the dogma that is the scientific method (despite its overall worthiness as a strategy), but from the acknowledgment that we are fundamentally limited in our senses and recall, and that our realities are tapestries fabricated by these limitations (to put a lame poetic twist on it) AND that we must be forever doubting, questioning, and exploring if we are to maximize our lives. then, knowing that we operate on faith, and understanding its role in our lives, and struggling to understand it, we can also eject it when it fails to provide a practical answer -- and the practical answer to "why do i do anything if it's all unknowable to me" is not "LOL GOD!" but "because i am what i am, and i must move forward," and to have faith in your own essential nature as not just a human being, but in your own self and the product of your eminently fallible senses and recall -- and that you continue to test and observe and doubt and question in order to COMPENSATE for the nature of faith itself and its necessity in your existence.
