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Your example of gravity is just the reverse. You have no faith, then something happens, and, as you can reproduce the result on demand, you believe in it. That's faith but not blind faith.

I did not express myself clearly. The blind faith of science is the scientific method itself. That if an effect can be reproduced every time it is tried, then it is a "hard fact", -- is the deductive scientific method and it requires just as much faith as the Incarnation. Now, once a scientist has faith in his method, he produces proofs, that, for example, men cannot walk on water. Likewise, once a theologian has faith he produces proofs that, for example, men who steady their spiritual gaze on Christ can walk on water. Faith and reason necessarily interoperate in theology and they interoperate in science, just as much.

Moreover, reason cannot start absent faith, -- theorem cannot be proven absent axiom. But faith can start absent reason, as we see in children.

"Moreover, reason cannot start absent faith, -- theorem cannot be proven absent axiom. But faith can start absent reason, as we see in children."

Beautifully stated.

I remember going through a bit of a "crisis" as I got into the higher levels of calculus in college.

Things had changed from a neat world where, for instance, one could multiply length x width of a rectangle and have an "exact" area (of course the italics are there because one can never have an exact area of an actual rectangular surface due to the limitations of measuring the lengths and determining the precision of a right angle) -- to a much messier world where one was dealing with irregular objects.

At the very least, with a theoretical rectangle, one can calculate an exact area in a way that the average mind can visualize. I remember talking to the professor at the time, asking him if the problems we were solving really gave an exact calculation of the area of a surface with irregularly curved edges, or whether it was just an estimation -- even in a theoretical, perfect world situation.

He thought a minute, and then replied: "What is important is not that it is exact. What is important is that it is consistent." In other words, he was differentiating clearly between consistent reproducibility and truth, even in a discipline as "hard" as mathematics. (He was a Christian -- a conservative Catholic, as I recall -- incidentally.)

And of course, even the consistency of reproducibility depends on the conditions, even as specified in theoretical problems. Newtonian physics is perfectly servicable for ordinary everyday life (and according to Newtonian physics it is, of course, impossible for a man to walk on water), but it breaks down as a tool for explaining other situations -- thus the development of quantum mechanics, relativity, etc... And of course the highest levels of theoretical physics today almost resemble philosophy and metaphysics more than they resemble what we think of as a reproducible science.

Certainly the evolutionary biology that I learned demanded incredible amounts of axiomatic faith. The only way one could be attuned to seeing the faith involved in evolutionary biology was if one had a sense of the authority of revelation that was powerful enough to force one to step back and look at it more objectively.

You are exactly right that reason, and even observation for that matter, require faith (i.e. working assumptions or axioms) as a starting point. The fact that these axioms produce working results reinforces the wisdom of trusting them, but by definition an axiom is an unprovable proposition that one chooses to trust in.

Likewise, ones direct experience of God together with the historical experience of the Church reinforces the wisdom of trusting the starting axiom or working assumption of Christianity -- that is, the deposit of faith once delivered, Holy Tradition in its entirety, that we in faith accept and believe.

The blind faith of science is the scientific method itself. That if an effect can be reproduced every time it is tried, then it is a "hard fact", -- is the deductive scientific method and it requires just as much faith as the Incarnation

Not even close! Scientific method is restricted to creating working models, through observation and experimentation. Within a defined environment, the model works. Thus, the Ptolemaic navigational system works today as it did in the 2nd century A.D. although it is factually wrong.

Clearly, today we know for certain that the Sun is not located between Venus and Mars. But his system predicts positions of heavenly bodies because it was tailored to observed motions and expressed (described) by mathematical fourmlae. Mathematics is simply a system of expressions that describe a relationship of terms, whether they are real or not. That relationship is absolute, i.e. a straight line is defined by two points.

There is nothing to disbelieve science: it either works, in which canse we "believe" it (more like "accept" it), or it doesn't work, in which case we discard it, "disbelieve" the reasoning behind it and reject it as false.

Faith is "evidence of things unseen" says +Paul; it is hope; it is not something you can observe, systematize and define so that it may "produce" desired effect on demand, repeatedly.