faith based science?

There are various levels of answers to this question, depending on how accurately you want the phenomena described or what principles you would prefer to understand it in terms of.However, basically, electric and magnetic fields never exert a force on an object they are not in contact with, the must first reach the object they are going to influence. They do so by travelling at the speed of light from the source object which creates them.

What is travelling is indeed the fields.This can be easily checked experimentally. If you create a magnetic dipole, a series of Teslameters placed away from the dipole will begin to detect a magnetic field at the exact strength predicted by Maxwell's equations and at the exact time Maxwell's equations predict the field should reach the Teslameter.