Of What Value Is Theology?
In A Universe from Nothing (2012), physicist Lawrence Krauss makes a striking claim about theology:
I have challenged several theologians to provide evidence contradicting the premise that theology has made no contribution to knowledge in the past five hundred years at least, since the dawn of science. So far no one has provided a counterexample. The most I have ever gotten back was the query, “What do you mean by knowledge?” … Had I presented the same challenge to biologists, or psychologists, or historians, or astronomers, none of them would have been so flummoxed. (London: Simon & Schuster, p. 144)
It’s an interesting challenge—if theology hasn’t generated new knowledge for centuries, why should anyone take it seriously today?
The key to Krauss’ argument is the assumption that equates knowledge almost entirely with the production of new scientific facts. Once that assumption is unpacked, the argument loses its bite.
What counts as knowledge?
A useful analogy here is the United States Constitution. The Bible functions for the Christian life in much the same way that the Constitution functions for the national life of the United States: it is a foundational text setting out principles that prevail beyond the circumstances in which it was written.
The Constitution was drafted in the 1780s, yet its meaning is still being worked out today through court decisions and legal reasoning. No one suggests that constitutional law has failed because it does not contribute in a tangible, measurable way to the life of the United States. Never would we hear complaints that the Constitution has added not a single job for American workers! or that time spent on constitutional deliberations is time that wasn’t spent on convicting criminals! The impact that constitutional interpretation has on the United States lies elsewhere—in the maintenance of institutional coherence, for example.
Christian theology operates similarly. Over centuries, theologians have reflected on questions of God, human nature, moral responsibility, truth, and the structure of reality. As this lengthy process has unfolded, a coherent Christian view of who we are and how we fit into the world has emerged. That understanding has shaped laws, institutions, moral expectations, and intellectual life across a variety of cultural contexts.
Christian theology aims to further our understanding of God and His created order, rather than producing new empirical scientific knowledge. The byproducts of theology include the clarification of meaning and values, and the moral and philosophical frameworks within which inquiry can take place.
Theology and the birth of modern science
There is also a historical dimension that Krauss likely overlooked. Modern science did not emerge in a cultural vacuum. As we argue in Origin: Why Genesis 1–11 Trumps Secular Accounts, an essential precondition for the scientific enterprise was the Christian conviction that the universe is orderly, intelligible, and governed by consistent laws.
The philosopher Loren Eiseley famously noted that science owed its beginnings to “the Christian conception of the nature of God,” which led to the “sheer act of faith that the universe possessed order and could be interpreted by rational minds”.1 That belief was not itself a scientific discovery; it was a theological premise based on the nature of God as revealed in the Bible. But without this premise, the systematic investigation of nature would have struggled to get off the ground. Indeed, history tells us that the sustainable scientific enterprise we are heirs to today was birthed in sixteenth century Christian Europe.
Once the scientific enterprise was underway, people from a wide range of religious and non-religious backgrounds made (and continue to make) important contributions. But this does not erase the significance of the theological foundations that helped launch the modern scientific project in the first place.
A changing cultural environment
Every society is underpinned by background assumptions about truth, authority, and meaning. For much of Western history, those assumptions were shaped by Christianity.
In recent decades in the West, the Christian worldview has lost its place of prominence. But it has not been replaced by a neutral, value-free alternative. Instead, we see the rise of a loose set of ideas in which nature is treated as self-explanatory and morally authoritative. (Krauss and his colleagues, like the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, deserve special mention here for their contributions to this new worldview.) Also noteworthy is the fact that within this new framework, shared standards of truth and reason have become harder to sustain.
This outlook is not a revival of ancient pagan religion in any literal sense (although Steven D. Smith terms it neopaganism), nor does it depend on people consciously holding religious beliefs. It is better understood as a functional worldview; a worldview that borrows elements from pre-Christian ways of thinking, expressed in modern, secular language.
The result is a culture that is often inclusive in aspiration but fragmented in practice, with competing moral claims and no clear basis for resolving them. Does this emerging culture sound like a science-friendly environment?
The irony of the “war on science”
There is a certain irony here. In 2025, just over a decade after dismissing theology as epistemically irrelevant in A Universe from Nothing, Krauss edited The War on Science: Thirty-Nine Renowned Scientists and Scholars Speak Out about Current Threats to Free Speech, Open Inquiry, and the Scientific Process.
The book documents growing concerns within the scientific and academic communities about ideological pressures and the risks associated with expressing dissenting views. These are real issues, and they deserve to be taken seriously.
But it is worth asking how we arrived at this point. The erosion of open scientific inquiry has occurred not under the aegis of a broadly accepted Christian theology, but in a cultural environment that has largely rejected it. Crucially, this new environment has not brought with it any robust alternative grounding for objective truth or intellectual freedom.
Theology as an enabler
This brings us back to the original question. The way Krauss saw it, theology deserved to be treated as a competitor to science, or as a relic that science has rendered obsolete. A more accurate view is that Christian theology has historically functioned as an enabler of the institutional and moral conditions that make sustained knowledge-seeking possible (if not mandatory).
Or, to use our previous analogy, think of the immense impact of the U.S. Constitution on national life. It has enabled a whole country to aspire to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, even though it never contributed a single dollar to the US Treasury. Similarly, the impact of Christian theology does not show up in laboratory results or citation counts, but without it, the scientific enterprise becomes increasingly fragile.
A question worth asking
Krauss asked theologians what their discipline has contributed to knowledge over the past five hundred years. That is a fair question. But considering the answer we’ve provided above, there is another question that Krauss himself might like to consider.
With Christian theology increasingly pushed to the margins, what is the long-term outlook for the scientific enterprise—or, for that matter, the notion of objective truth?
This is a question that scientists can’t afford to ignore.
- Eiseley, L. (1958). Darwin’s Century: Evolution and the Men Who Discovered It. New York: Doubleday, p. 62. ↩︎