A Good Question about Faith

This week, I was listening to the "Faith and Freethought" podcast, one of the Triad of Reason podcasts most famous for the "Infidel Guy" show by Reggie Finley. On this particular episode, there were three friends, including the host, who had attended a Christian college together -- where they each had lost their faith. During the discussion, they brought up a question they had asked their professors, but one for which they had never received a response! I think it is worth pondering:

How can faith be used as the basis of an epistemological framework when it does not provide a means of discerning true claims from false ones?

This is just a paraphrase, but the gist of it is there.

In other words, faith itself does not distinguish whether what one has his faith in is true or false. If by its very nature, faith offers no insight into truth, why should faith serve any role at all in our pursuit of truth? I welcome responses while continue I think about the question as well.