When Sue Peacock was diagnosed with breast cancer at the age of 43 
“all hell broke loose”. It had taken her eight months to get a diagnosis for the niggling feeling that something was wrong. Within a month she’d been into surgery twice and had a mastectomy. At first, the whirlwind of medical treatments was reassuring. “Everything is being done to you and for a while that’s comforting, but that soon wears off,” she says. “I fell apart; that’s not unusual. I had to honour that in myself. 
I needed to acknowledge that I was in 
a pretty bad place.”

She soon realised she needed to look elsewhere to help her deal with the emotional fallout. Friends and family rallied. “I experienced quite profoundly that there were these amazing people around me. Some people I thought would be there weren’t, while others just came out of the woodwork and magically appeared. You can get a sense of strength by putting your faith in other people.”

She also found solace by looking inward. “I found this inner strength, and who knows where that comes from. It’s 
a sense that, ‘No, this is not going to get me, or if it is I’m going to give it a damned good fight.’ But it’s also a sense of, ‘I’m going to enjoy the life I have and I’m not going to let the disease rule who I am.’

“I found great solace in keeping a journal. I found it hard work at the time to be constantly telling things to people. So to write down how I felt, and what was working for me and what wasn’t, helped a lot. It also helped later when I could look back and think, ‘I got through it then, 
I can get through it now,’” she says. “You put faith in yourself, in your own ability.”

Faith has a bad reputation in some circles. By definition faith is an individual belief, and that can encompass pretty much anything – including dogmatic or harmful ideas. British biologist Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, is one of the most prominent critics of faith. “Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence,” he has said.

BLIND FAITH

It’s true that blind faith can lead us in the wrong direction. “There is this concept in behavioural economics called self-serving bias,” says Ian McDonald, a professor of economics at Melbourne University. “A factor in this global financial crisis was an excessive optimism in the financial sector in the US. They had an unrealistic faith in their ability to make money.”

Faith isn’t always rational but many of us still need it. For one thing, faith in a higher power (whatever 
that may be) can be good for us. 
A 2007 article by David Williams and Michelle Sternthal in The Medical Journal of Australia analysed more than 1000 studies examining how religious faith can influence health. The results were impressive: people who attended a religious service lived an average of seven-and-a-half years longer than people who never attended. Religious people were more likely to have better immune function and had better overall mental health. They were more likely to have better diets, smoke less and drink less alcohol and were less likely to engage 
in risky behaviours. Interestingly, the studies also found that strict or fundamentalist religious practice led 
to a higher rate of depression.

Religion can also offer social support and a sense of connectedness, which has a profound effect on our wellbeing. Feeling supported and connected to a community lowers stress, which could lead to better health overall.

SPIRITUALITY

Faith and spirituality also exist outside organised religion. The researchers pointed out that one of the difficulties 
of their study was defining religious faith as opposed to spirituality. “Spirituality appears to mean different things 
to different people,” they wrote. 
“For many, spirituality refers to an 
individual’s attempt to find meaning in life, which can include a sense of involvement with the transcendent outside institutional boundaries.”

George Vaillant, a US psychiatrist 
and the author of Spiritual Evolution: 
A Scientific Defense of Faith, argues that faith does not have to exist outside science and that it is central to our humanity. “The word ‘spirituality’ has many meanings,” he writes. “Spirituality is not just about following your bliss. [It] has a deep psychological basis – a reality rooted in the positive human emotions that needs to be better understood.

“Today many fear or mock religion because of its association with ‘holy terror’ or ‘assault on reason’. By taking the science of positive emotions seriously, we can make spirituality palatable, even useful, to the critics of religions. Simultaneously, we can help those enthralled by their own faith traditions to appreciate what they have in common with the faith traditions of others, and to think, ‘I’ve got a level of responsibility in this, as well, for my own wellbeing.’”

Vaillant believes faith is the “amalgam of the positive emotions that bind us to other human beings”. Faith, he says, is made up of love, hope, forgiveness, joy, compassion, awe and gratitude. Not only that, but just as fear is an important emotion to keep us out of danger, faith has been equally important for our survival. “Negative emotions such as fear and anger are inborn and are of tremendous importance. Dedicated to individual survival, the negative emotions are ‘all about me’. In contrast, positive emotions have the potential to free the self from the self.”

While fear and anger help us to escape immediate threats, emotions that arise from faith help us to survive in the long term. “We feel both the emotions of vengeance and forgiveness deeply, but 
the long-term results of these two emotions are very different,” Vaillant writes. “Negative emotions are often crucial for survival – but only in time present. The more positive emotions 
help us broaden and build. They widen our tolerance, expand our moral compass and enhance our creativity. They help 
us to survive in the future.”

CRISIS

We often turn to faith during dark times. Often, the distractions of ordinary day-to-day life, such as work and career, relationships and what to eat for dinner, 
keep us preoccupied, but a crisis can change all that.

“People will sometimes say that a crisis helped put things in perspective,” says 
Dr Suzy Green, a positive psychologist. 
A loss of some kind – whether it’s the loss 
of a job, a home or a loved one – can make the details of life come to seem insignificant and give us a chance to look at life on its grand scale. However, this means we often find ourselves asking big questions about life when we are in a state of grief. It’s then that we most need our faith.

“Faith is a belief in a power higher than oneself,” says Dr Green. “You can have faith in God or an organised religion. You can have faith in the world and some people say they have faith in the universe. Or you can have faith in your friends, faith in your community or faith in a group of people that share similar values.” People can also have faith in material things or money, but ultimately faith is only beneficial if it is directed towards some kind of belief in humanity.

Humanity-based faith is valuable because it gives us a sense of meaning outside of ourselves. Especially in times of grief it’s valuable to know there’s a world outside of our own troubles. “When people gather together there is a sense of purpose that there is something greater than ourselves,” says Dr Green. “That belief can make life profoundly meaningful for us.”

In 1993 Jeff Gambin was a successful Sydney restaurateur in the midst of a personal crisis. One cold night he was walking through the city, mulling over his problems, when he sat down on a bench to think things through. “I heard a shuffling of feet and I looked up and there was this person standing there,” he recalls. “I was quite annoyed as I just wanted to be left alone. He had a little bag, which he opened, and he took out an old blanket that was just about the only thing in the bag. And he said, 
‘Mate, you’re going to need this.’ So I said, 
‘What about you?’ He said, ‘It doesn’t matter any more,’ and walked away.”

The experience had a profound effect on Gambin, who decided to open an organisation to help feed the homeless, called Just Enough Faith, which has helped countless homeless people for 
16 years. It also gave Gambin a renewed sense of purpose in his life. “If you help someone else it’s amazing how much faith you can find in your own self,” he says.

EMOTIONAL PERSPECTIVE

Faith can comfort us in rough times and give us the impetus to keep going when all else is lost. While science can help us understand the world from a rational perspective, faith can help us understand the world from an emotional perspective. The point of faith is not to explain the world but to offer comfort from it. 
“Faith allows us to have acceptance,” 
says Dr Green. “It’s an opportunity to understand that that’s the circle of life: there is life and death, good times and bad times. In terms of our mental health, 
is there any harm in holding a belief if 
it’s not hurting ourselves or others and, 
in fact, it’s actually helping us?”

Faith can also lead us towards another important emotion: hope. “In positive psychology, faith is about believing in something bigger than yourself, whereas hope is about believing in yourself and 
your ability to reach your goals and to 
find pathways to get to those goals,” says 
Dr Green. “People who have high levels of hope in their lives do much better.”

Peacock had chemotherapy and was on hormone therapy for five years before getting the all-clear. Now she volunteers for Cancer Connect, where she offers phone counselling to people with breast cancer. “When people get to the stage of accepting their own strength and have faith in themselves, regardless of the outcome, it’s a better process than just being a victim,” she says.

“Faith gives people the strength to keep going when things fall apart,” Dr Green says. Or, in the words of Martin Luther King Jr, “Faith is taking the first step, even when you don’t see the whole staircase.”