I had forgotten when you first mentioned it that I had read this BL article about it a while back. As grandiose as the author makes the idea sound, he concludes that the discipline can tell us about ourselves. He makes no claim about the discipline providing information about the actual content or target of faith, really faiths.
Fair enough. My purpose in asking, however, is not to argue whether I think your perspective is correct or not, but to understand better how you are looking at things. We can leave it.
We both need to be more clear about what we mean here, I think.
I think you probaby don’t mean wanting to prove “faith” as “belief”, that is that you don’t intend to prove that people can hold some sort of faith or belief, or what that believing is from the side of the person.
Although, looking at the effects on humans of faith and any other form of belief (including non-religious) and resulting practices and the effects of those – those are observable in many ways and so could be studied. Many have been already.
and
Specifically what would you examine and study in order to do this? Can you get down to the nitty gritty? Or can you get to a specific question you would seek to explore that uses things that can be observed? If you can’t observe the things directly and must rely on examining it indirectly (rather like determining the existence of stars one cannot actually see, for example) you will need to be able to determine your results aren’t caused by something else. Etc. etc.
What would you test in such a way?
In a different direction, have you looked for attempts that have already been made and read about them? Did they succeed? If not, where did they go wrong?
The tricky thing with success in your quest, though, is the problem of ongoing research. What happens if you develop a hypothesis, test it, and then someone else repeats your study and finds it faulty? Or explainable in other, better ways?