Is faith the same as a scientific theory?

Nope. That is one of those silly and annoying things that believers say just to annoy non-believers. In fact, science is the exact opposite of belief without evidence. You cannot even call a scientific theory a theory without compelling evidence and reproducible experiments with predictable results, something that faith woefully lacks. In science, until you have a reproducible theory and a wealth of empirical data it is just a hypothesis. That's where faith stands. Faith is unquestioning belief in a mere hypothesis and worse yet, it is unquestioning belief in many hypothesis that have been refuted and disproven time and time again, not just belief without evidence but belief against all contradictory evidence. That doesn't sound like any scientific theory I have ever heard of.

To suggest that magic underwear, virgin births, reincarnation, ressurection, and wine and crackers turning into the blood and flesh of someone who died two thousand years ago are on equal footing with gravity and The first Law of Matter and Energy is too absurd to even bear repeating. The idea that the belief that the secrets of the universe are contained in a book written by people who believed that the earth was flat, less than four thousand years old, the center of the universe, and that the sky was made of water, is as sensible or anything remotely similar to the idea that we don't know anything with absolute certainty and all theories are subject to change as new theories are created and new evidence is introduced is unsuportable. They are completely dichotomous.

To make the claim that the belief that you can cure terminal illnesses with prayer is the same as the belief that you can cure cancer with surgery and chemotherapy or, here's a better example, the belief that you can cure AIDS with penicilin is idiotic. I use the example of the AIDS penicilin hypothesis to illustrate the difference. There was a belief among a fringe element of scientists that because the HIV virus behaved much like the Syphilis virus that it should be treated the same way, with penicilin. They tried it and it didn't work so the medical/scientific community discarded the theory. When has religion ever discraded theories because they didn't work? To even make the claim that belief in scientific theory is the same as faith demonstrates a fundamnetal lack of understanding of the scientific method.

If a scientist were to make a statement like "seek and you shall find. Knock and the door will be opened. Ask and it shall be given to you." he'd conduct an experiment and if it didn't pan out even once the theory would be immediately disgarded. In faith, when these claims invariably do not pan out they are rationalized with statements like "You didn't have enough faith" or "You should not test God" or the old fall back position "God works in mysterious ways". When the answer should be "Well, I guess that was just a bunch of bullshit." Fear and desire, emotions not facts, are the backbones of faith. Logic and empirical data, experiments with predictable results that can be reproduced, not unverified, unverifiable miracles that can never be reproduced, are the backbones of science.

I like how this guy explains the differences (another black atheist by the way). He's a lot nicer about it than I am:

http://theblackatheist.blogspot.com/2008/07/do-scientists-have-faith.html