I would say that civilization requires faith at least in beginning and probably always.
Evolutionary game theory strongly suggest it does. As products of evolution by natural selection, we are innately selfish. Our behavior is anchored in hardwired desires which in turn focuses on short-term survival and reproduction.
Even our reason ultimate depends on hardwired emotions. We can't use reason to decide between two courses of actions unless we first desire one outcome over the other. When tend to rationalize why we should fulfill our desires, to the harm of others, much more often than we rationalize we should suffer loss or take risk for others not genetically related to us.
If one looks at religions form the perspective of behavior control, of suppressing short term immediate selfish impulses to foster long term thinking and cooperation, then all religion look the same.
Religions impose significant material cost on societies, especially in the materially poor past. There is an odd concept that our forbearers were morons stumbling around in a superstitious haze bumping into trees. But our forbearers had far fewer resources than we and far less margin for error. Their behaviors had to be more precisely adapted to circumstances than ours. When the population devotes 90% of it's efforts just to grow food, there's not a lot of room for maladaptive behaviors.
We've fallen into the trap of thinking them foolish because we regard their explanations for why they made this or that choice as nonsense. What we missed was that the explanations are irrelevant, only the consequences of the behaviors matter. E.g. many traditional medicines work even though the explanations for their mechanism of action are nonsense. There is no connection between a justification for a behavior and the adaptive benefit of the behavior. It does not matter why someone believes that should act less selfishly, it only matters that they do.
If religions did not produce some concrete material good, very quickly selection forces would favor societies with progressively less and less religion. Societies that wasted resources on religious constructions, manpower on clerics and time on rituals would be outcompeted by societies who could use the same resources for roads or defenses, the same manpower for work or war and the same time for production.
Instead, we see religion being completely ubiquitous throughout history and the most dynamic and innovative cultural periods also being ones of great religious fervor.
The problem that religion fixes is that morality is something of a lie when looked at from purely materialistic terms. If an individual can get a signficant advantage by harming another without paying material consequence, then evolutionarily, there is no reason not to. That is especially true in primitive conditions where material consequences are unlikely and interdependence low.
With the experience of thousands of years of practical experience behind us, we can argue that enlightened self-interest might guide us today, but how did the ball start rolling in the first place? How do people learn to cooperate on progressively larger scales when everyone can determine rationally and accurately that they personally could benefit from quicker and surer by cheating, exploiting and killing?
That's were religion comes in. It invents a consequence where one does not not exist. Religion supplies the one behavior modifier that no secular idea can: inescapable consequence for moral choices.
For the faithful, regardless of the faith, their is always an inescapable consequences for selfish moral decisions. In a purely secular society, the most power humans, or one thinking himself just smarter than those around him, have no rational incentive not to abuse others.
In a faithful society, however, the behavior of the most power human is still subject to to judgement by the divine. Whether that conceived of as a personified god or some mindless supernatural force doesn't matter, nor does it matter if it "true" to any degree. To produce a positive material effect. It just matters that most believe inescapable consequence will fall upon the selfish and uncooperative.
Once the belief in such inescapable consequence becomes part an axiom for one's reasoning, then cooperation, self-denial and self-sacrfice appear rational and optimal choices for individuals. More over, if one knows that most of the rest of a society believe the same thing, then it is rational to assume their behavior is likewise moderated making them more trusty. This lowers transaction cost and increases social cohesion, making the society materially wealthier, less internally contentious and more militarily effective. All the great periods of dynamic innovation and growth in human cultures are associated with ages of great piety.
On the other hand, the direct example of the last 200 years strongly suggest that polities grow more brittle and prone to violence as they grow more secular. Since the French Revolution onward, the more secular the dominate political ideology, the more murderous the regime. Robespierre feared no divine consequence and neither did Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Kim il Sung or Pol Pot. Once they reasoned that their actions were necessary and that they could escape material consequences for their choices, there were no limiters on their behaviors.
Since we are trapped with our darwinian cores we may always require that a high percentage of our population be religious. It's pretty clear that we really needed it in the past.
