Couldn't we say the same thing about everything that people do? People go to the supermarket because they fear hunger. Medical researchers practice science because they fear disease. Explorers and pure researchers do what they do because they fear the unknown. People fall in love because they fear loneliness...
I think that people feel more positive motivations too. In most cases it isn't primarily fear that drives them. That's as true for religion as it is for the rest of life, including science.
I think that I might define 'faith' as something like 'confidence in the truth of beliefs that aren't absolutely certain'.
Seen in that light, faith is necessary for human existence, since we can't be absolutely certain of anything. That's true for science as much as anything else. We trust that natural laws exist that hold true universally, even though there's no way that we can actually know that. (The problem of induction.) We trust in the necessary applicability of the principles of logic to reality, even though nobody has yet been able to provide a fully convincing account of what logic is or how we come to know about it. We trust in the universal applicability of cause and effect...
We should also keep in mind that the goals being sought and the nature of confirming evidence might be rather different in science and religion. Science is concerned with objective sensory experience. Religion is typically more concerned with subjective interior experience. Science succeeds when it manages to produce publicly verifiable predictions of physical states of affairs. Religion works when it reduces psychological suffering and perhaps even provides a fleeting taste of transcendence.
I'm not convinced that those pursuits must always be contradictory and opposed.