Daring to Believe
There are few places in modern life where a person is encouraged to say something with confidence before every question has been resolved. Much of the world around us rewards verification. We compare reviews before buying something, check several sources before trusting a claim, measure performance, track outcomes, and expect evidence before making decisions. These habits have served us well. They have helped produce remarkable advances in medicine, science, technology, and our understanding of the natural world.
Faith enters that world carrying a very different kind of sentence: “I believe.”
For Catholics, those words appear most visibly in the Creed. Week after week, people stand together at Mass and profess belief in God, in Jesus Christ, in the Holy Spirit, in the Church, in resurrection, and in the life to come. The words do not begin with “I understand.” They do not claim that every difficulty has disappeared or every question has been answered. They simply say, “I believe.”
Modern life rarely asks us to speak that way. Science has made the world more intelligible than earlier generations could have imagined. We can describe the birth of stars, sequence a genome, observe activity inside the living brain, reconstruct ancient climates, and identify mechanisms of disease at the level of individual cells. Historical scholarship has given us new ways of examining ancient texts and the development of religious traditions. A person can encounter religions, philosophies, criticisms, and competing claims from across the world in a single afternoon.
The Catholic tradition has never required the world to become less intelligible in order for God to remain believable. Thomas Aquinas pursued the natural world and human reason because he thought truth could withstand investigation. Centuries later, John Paul II opened Fides et Ratio by describing faith and reason as “two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth.”[1] The image avoids forcing a choice. Faith and reason are not rivals competing for the same ground. They belong to the same search.
The Catechism makes a similar claim, saying that methodical scientific research, when carried out in a truly scientific manner and according to moral norms, can never conflict with faith because the things of the world and the things of faith derive from the same God.[2] Whatever one makes of that theological claim, the posture is clear. Discovery need not be treated as a threat.
In fact, the closer science looks at human life, the more interesting the conversation can become.
In 2016, researchers studying more than 74,000 women in the Nurses’ Health Study reported that women who attended religious services more than once a week had a 33 percent lower risk of death during the period studied than women who never attended.[3] The researchers adjusted for a wide range of demographic, medical, and lifestyle factors. Social support, smoking, depressive symptoms, and optimism appeared to explain part of the association.
The result is striking, but it does not prove what it cannot prove. The study was observational. It cannot establish that religious attendance caused the lower mortality, and it certainly cannot tell us whether the beliefs practiced there are true. The authors also acknowledged that religious life can carry negative effects, including guilt, anxiety, and intolerance. What the study can show is narrower and still interesting, that participation in religious community was associated with measurable differences in health and longevity.[3]
Other research approaches similar territory without beginning with religion. A 2026 meta-analysis combined 25 samples involving nearly 489,000 people in the United States, Europe, and Asia. People reporting a stronger sense of purpose in life had a lower risk of earlier death, an association that persisted, though weakened, after researchers accounted for behavioral, clinical, and psychological factors.[4] The authors did not claim that purpose causes longevity, and they did not define where purpose should come from. They found that something as difficult to hold in the hand as a sense of purpose still appeared alongside measurable differences in human lives.
These findings do not turn science into theology, and they do not turn religion into medicine. They simply allow different ways of looking at human life to notice some of the same things. Religious traditions have long placed great weight on community, meaning, gratitude, forgiveness, ritual, service, hope, and the sense that an individual life belongs to something larger than itself. Modern research can now examine some of the effects associated with those practices and convictions.
That resemblance should not be asked to carry an argument for God. Christianity does not become true because church attendance correlates with longevity. Purpose does not become evidence for the Resurrection because it appears associated with better health. A useful belief is not necessarily a true belief.
Still, careful measurement does not require us to imagine that faith belongs to some sealed-off part of human existence untouched by the rest of reality. Beliefs become habits. Habits shape relationships. Communities influence behavior. Hope changes choices. Practices repeated over years can leave traces in bodies as well as minds. Faith, when lived, becomes part of the observable world.
John Henry Newman understood another part of the problem. He spent much of his life thinking about how people actually arrive at conviction. In his Apologia Pro Vita Sua, while considering the difficulties surrounding Christian belief, he wrote, “Ten thousand difficulties do not make one doubt.”[5]
Newman was not claiming there were no difficulties. His own intellectual life was full of them. He was distinguishing between having unanswered questions and withdrawing belief altogether. That distinction has become increasingly useful in a world with almost unlimited access to objections.
A person can spend years moving from question to question. Archaeology leads to textual criticism. Textual criticism leads to philosophy. Philosophy leads to neuroscience. Neuroscience leads to consciousness. Consciousness leads back to the question of what a human being actually is. Every answer seems capable of revealing another question behind it. There is nothing dishonest about continuing to ask, but there is also no guarantee that inquiry will eventually produce a condition in which nothing remains uncertain.
Evidence can be substantial without becoming exhaustive. Faith lives somewhere within that human condition.
Faith involves both intellect and will.[6] Questions remain legitimate. Evidence deserves examination. Reason has work to do. Yet belief eventually involves more than collecting information about a possibility. There comes a point when a person must decide whether what has been seen is enough to trust.
Daring to believe begins there.
Benedict of Nursia approached the question from an unexpectedly practical direction. He spent little time constructing elaborate arguments for belief. His Rule concerns the shape of a life. When should people pray? How should work be shared? How should possessions be treated? How should guests be welcomed? What happens when someone fails?
For Benedict, belief acquires a rhythm. The bell rings and the community gathers. The Psalms are prayed again. Work resumes. Meals are shared. A stranger arrives and is received. Evening comes, and tomorrow the same life begins again.
A monk does not solve the existence of God before breakfast. He lives inside a pattern that keeps him attentive to the possibility of God. Benedict seems to assume that some understanding comes only through participation. A person may learn something about prayer by praying, about forgiveness by forgiving, about community by remaining in one, and perhaps something about belief by living for a while as though belief might be true.
That does not require pretending. It allows experience to become part of the evidence.
Modern science often works in a surprisingly similar spirit. A hypothesis is exposed to reality. Something is tried, observed, questioned, repeated, and refined. The comparison only goes so far, but there is a shared humility in allowing reality to answer back.
That leaves an interesting possibility for someone standing uncertainly at the edge of belief. There is no need to become suspicious of science, close difficult books, or stop asking uncomfortable questions. There is no need to manufacture certainty either.
The invitation can remain smaller than that. Keep looking. Pray, perhaps. Return. Stand among other people one Sunday and listen carefully as they say the Creed. Notice what belief does in the lives around you and what happens when you allow it some room in your own.
The modern world has taught us to ask for evidence, and there is wisdom in that instinct. It has also given us better tools for noticing that belief, meaning, community, and practice can leave measurable traces in human lives. Science and faith need not retreat from one another when they meet there. Each can make the other conversation more interesting.
Eventually every person encounters questions whose answers remain incomplete. Somewhere beyond the last thing that can presently be demonstrated, another possibility remains.
To dare to believe.
References
[1] John Paul II, Fides et Ratio, 1998. https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_14091998_fides-et-ratio.html
[2] Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 159, “Faith and Science.” https://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/__PX.HTM
[3] Li, S., Stampfer, M. J., Williams, D. R., and VanderWeele, T. J. “Association of Religious Service Attendance With Mortality Among Women.” JAMA Internal Medicine, 2016. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/2521827
[4] “Purpose in Life and Mortality: A Meta-Analysis.” PubMed record, 2026. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/42417009/
[5] John Henry Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua, Chapter 5. https://newmanreader.org/works/apologia/part7.html
[6] Catechism of the Catholic Church, nos. 153–155, on faith as grace and a human act of intellect and will. https://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/__PW.HTM