#929 Emily Qureshi-Hurst: God, Salvation, and the Problem of Spacetime

00:00 Ricardo Lopes: Hello, everybody. Welcome to a new episode of the Decent. I'm your host, Ricardo Lob. And today I'm joined by Doctor Emily Qureshi Hurst. She's a Stinar lecturer in Philosophy at Oriel College and a junior research fellowship at Pen Brook College, University of Oxford. And today we're talking about her book, God Salvation and The Problem of Spacetime. So, Doctor Qureshi Hurst, welcome to the show. It's a pleasure to everyone.

00:30 Emily Qureshi-Hurst: Thank you so much for inviting me. I'm really looking forward to having a conversation with you about this.

00:34 Ricardo Lopes: So I, I mean, this is a very interesting book and actually, to be honest, it's not that common for me to get into topics in theology on the show. So I, I mean, just to perhaps introduce the audience to the main questions we are exploring here today. First of all, what is the metaphysics of time and what kinds of questions does it tackle?

01:01 Emily Qureshi-Hurst: So that's a really great question to start with because in a sense, all of the conversations we're gonna be having about philosophy, about theology and about spacetime are structured in accordance with some of the conceptual categories that we get from the metaphysics of time. So metaphysics very broadly is the study of ultimate reality. So maybe the study of being the study of change identity, that sort of thing. Uh And the metaphysics of time then asks what time is uh does time exist? Does it flow? Do all moments of time exist eternally? Or is the future unreal the present real and the past gone forever? So it's those kind of questions that are asked, does time pass? Does time exist? What are moments of time? Um And how best should we try and come towards an answer to these questions as well?

01:54 Ricardo Lopes: So in the book, uh and since you come at this, mainly through a philosophical perspective, but you also have a bit of theology to it. And then you also go through some of the science. And later in our conversation, we're going to talk about the relationship there between these three domains of knowledge, let's say, but you also go a little bit through the history of how philosophers have fought about time. So when it comes to the ancient philosophers, what were the main ideas they have about time? Exactly

02:33 Emily Qureshi-Hurst: of time or the metaphysics of time is really fascinating because it's in a sense unique in that we've been asking very, very similar questions about time for thousands of years and we still haven't really come across any answers that everybody agrees on. So um it there are some really durable key concerns there um there were of course different ways of tackling these questions across time. But we see embryonic forms of the debates and the metaphysics of time today in the classical discussions. So one of the distinctions that is sometimes drawn is between the view of Heraclius and the view of Parmenides. So Heraclius, uh well, we only have fragments of his texts, but pe people via reconstruction have come to the conclusion that Heraclius thought that everything was ultimately in flux. And so the only thing that we can be certain of is change itself, he famously said, uh you never step in the same river twice. So uh everything is in flux and in motion and these are early iterations of the kind of ideas we see in the so called a theory of time that says time objectively passes um in the metaphysics of time today. Whereas Parmenides seemed to believe that there was only one enduring universal substance and that any change or motion was ultimately ultimately an illusion. And so in that sense, uh we must, must think of time itself as static and unchanging as well. And that echoes the more contemporary theories of time known as the block universe or eternal or B or the B theory or C theory. And so even as far back as thousands of years ago, we're thinking about the nature of time and whether time does pass or doesn't pass, and there's not been much more agreement since then between scholars about that?

04:19 Ricardo Lopes: Mhm. Uh So some of those more modern theories of time that you're mentioning there, I mean, occur both in theoretical physics and also I guess the philosophy of physics, right. Yeah. Mhm. And how about medieval philosophy? What were some of the more dominant ideas during that period?

04:44 Emily Qureshi-Hurst: Yeah. So I'm not a medievalist, it's not my area of specialism. So I, I do touch upon some of these in the book. Um But it's very much a snapshot view. It's a really rich and interesting and complex uh historical period. And um so I can only speak to the kind of snapshots that I provide in the book, but it was a deeply religious time. And so lots of the questions about time and temporality were considered in relation to God and to theology. So some of the key questions were that God experience time, is God inside time subject to the passage of time himself? Or is God outside of time and views all moments of time, like we would be looking on to a painting. So he sees everything at once. Um And if that's the case, then what are the implications for the creature or human beings relation to time? Um So, yeah, tho those sorts of questions about God and God's relation to time, I think really dominated the period.

05:40 Ricardo Lopes: Uh You mentioned there very briefly that uh the medieval period was one where people were really religious and I mean, theology interrelated very much with philosophy. So was it really during this period or was it earlier that questions surrounding the nature of time interrelate with uh theological questions?

06:07 Emily Qureshi-Hurst: So we can see the connection between God and time going back almost as far as theology does? Because if you think about it, it in a sense underlies lots of the other key theological questions. So if we think of creation or the universe as fundamentally temporal as structured in accordance with time, then understanding how God relates to time is um is a prerequisite for understanding how God relates relates to creation at all. And so I think theological writers uh throughout the generations have been aware of this fact and therefore have seen time as something that is a really important theological resource.

06:47 Ricardo Lopes: So now, I in more recent times in the 20th and the 21st century, uh and we're focusing here mostly on philosophy of course, but you can also talk about theoretical physics. What are the most dominant ideas about time? Of course, earlier you mentioned in passing some of the main, some of the most dominant theories, but please give us a little bit more detail. I mean, what are the main ways people think about time nowadays?

07:21 Emily Qureshi-Hurst: So in a sense, we can think of pretty much the entirety of the philosophy of time since the 20th century as being written in the long shadow of a paper written by Jeremy McTaggart in 1908, McTaggart was concerned with um demonstrating that time was in fact unreal. And in order to make this argument, he distinguished between a few different ways that we could describe time. So the first he named the A series um and the A series describes time um as being fundamentally construed by properties of objective tense. So past, present and future are fundamental components of time. Next, he described the B series which says that time is fundamentally composed of temporal relations before after and simultaneous with. And the third was the C series which has received a lot less attention and this structures time in accordance with the relations of temporal between us. So um in a sense, the C series describes time a bit like a color spectrum and then it makes sense being read either way um from the, from the blue side to the red side. Um And in the same sense, the C series says that time can be understood just as adequately if you view it from the beginning of the universe to the end or the end of the universe from the beginning. So these have since been rarified into fully fledged temporal, the theories, not just the and so the a theory of time, there's a few different ones, but generally, they'll all share the properties of all the characteristics of saying that time objectively passes. So there is generally believed to be an unreal future, an objectively real present and a past which some a theories think the past does exist and some think it doesn't. But what's important is is there's this objective now, which is the same across the entire universe. And that now acts as a kind of frontier of becoming. So things pass from the unreal future into the real present. And in doing so they come into existence. So this kind of temporal theory can accommodate change objective becoming temporal passage, all of the things that when we encounter the world we think exists. So uh I I at the moment it's raining where I live and I can see raindrops falling down from my window sill and that seems to show that there's something dynamic happening there, there is, there is a moment of time where the water is just about to drip off my window sill and a moment where it's falling. Whereas the B and C theory of time deny that such passage is objective. So if you're a B theorist, you think the most important features of time are the temporal ordering relations of uh before and after. So what matters if you're giving a fundamental description of time is the order that events are in and the fact that this order is structured from beginning to end. And once you've described the locations in the temporal series of all of the events you you've described time. So in terms of what this means metaphysically, we might think of time as a so called block universe where moments in time are like points in space, they all exist even if we can't see them. So, uh just because I'm not in Egypt at the moment, it doesn't mean Egypt doesn't exist. And the B theory says, well, just because I'm not in 1977 at the moment doesn't mean that 1977 isn't objectively out there somewhere else in the universe. And the C series is also committed to the block universe. But instead of saying there's a as an objective order from past to present, it just says that there is this block and you can look at it in any direction as long as you've got the events in the right order, it doesn't matter which end of time you start with. So the metaphysics of time has largely focused on thinking about what these temporal theories mean, which ones are correct and support is given to each of these from different corners. So one of the fascinating things about time is that you can come at it from so many different disciplinary perspectives. You can think about temporal experience. You can come up with metaphysical arguments, you can come up with arguments that examine temporal language and the truth claims of temporal language. You can of course look to physics, different branches of physics. You sometimes get different answers about time. When you look at quantum physics, special relativity and general relativity. And obviously, we hope that that's not going to be the case, there's clues and inconsistencies there in science that need to be worked out. But um yeah, the metaphysics of time is really, really broad and really fascinating. And by its very nature, I think interdisciplinary, we need to take into account experience, physics, language metaphysics when we're trying to come up with answers about the nature of time and whether time passes or not.

12:15 Ricardo Lopes: So I want to ask you now a question that is more directly related to uh physics, theoretical physics about spacetime. But just before we get into that, I would like like to hear your thoughts on the question of how modern physics relates to metaphysics because of course, it's one thing for us to have an understanding of time or an account of time according to physics. Uh And people could say, OK, so that's the science of time or at least the physics of time because of course, we can also talk about the cognitive science of time, the psychology of time, which is not exactly the same thing as the the physics of time as we know. Uh But uh I mean, people who work on metaphysics do not necessarily have to agree that whatever physicists describe is the same as metaphysics or that should be the metaphysical account of reality, right? So how do you look at that relationship?

13:20 Emily Qureshi-Hurst: Yeah, that's a really great question. I personally am a huge fan of interdisciplinary and interdisciplinary collaboration. And I really don't think we can come to the right answers about life's biggest questions if we silo our academic disciplines and don't talk to each other. So back in um the early modern period, the discipline, one of the primary academic disciplines is Natural philosophy, which involved theology, uh empirical experimentation, metaphysics, geometry, maths. And we had a much more holistic understanding of how to approach these big questions. Now you do sometimes see physicists and metaphysicians not really talking to each other too much. And I think that's a problem. I mean, lots, lots of metaphysicians do engage with physics for, for good reason because we don't want to be just doing armchair philosophy. We don't want to just sit and reason and think well, OK, let's think about how all of these arguments work without actually looking at the world on its own terms and seeing what the world says. So physics without philosophy, I think is lost because it's just mathematics and data. And when you start building theories out of those, you're doing philosophy, some physicists don't want to admit it, but that's what they're doing. Uh And metaphysics, if you really want to delve deeply into reality and understand it, you need to be looking at reality. So not just from the perspective of an abstract argument but from the perspective of an empirical science. So I think they need to have a really close relationship and that doesn't mean that they need to collapse into each other. We need the particular skill sets of each of these disciplines and each of the prac practitioners of those disciplines in order to do the most rigorous work. But there should be open communication between them.

15:08 Ricardo Lopes: Yes. And of course, I, I mean, the question I was alluding to here or the, the comment I was alluding to here, let's say is that um the metaphysicians are not bound to uh I mean, the compromise of deriving their metaphysics directly from uh physics or theoretical physics, right? I mean, that's a debate to be had. Of course, I know that some physicists and also some philosophers uh start from the assumption that whatever the nature of reality is it is what physics uh says it is, but that's just an assumption and it can be discussed, right?

15:51 Emily Qureshi-Hurst: So it can be discussed. So the where I sit on this question is I think, I think I am a naturalist, which means I think that in principle, science is able to explain a lot of the uh questions about the world. But that doesn't mean that it has currently got the right answers. So I think there's a really important distinction there between saying in principle, we are able to arrive at answers to these questions via empirical means and then saying, oh, we have already done that and there's good reason to think that we probably haven't got all of the answers yet because our two fundament physical theories ie general relativity and quantum mechanics fundamentally disagree. Um And they're not able to be reconciled at the moment. It's one of the biggest problems in physics and time features in both of these. And so we have competing descriptions of time in a sense and we're, we're waiting for, for the answers for a general for a theory of everything or a theory of quantum gravity that will hopefully advance some of our, maybe advance the debate. I mean, who who knows? They might open even more questions than, than it gives answers. But yeah, I think in principle, we should be able to reach answers empirically with help for metaphysics, but it doesn't mean we're already there yet.

17:04 Ricardo Lopes: And with all of those caveats in mind, what is space time? I mean, what is the best understanding of space time we have through physics right now?

17:16 Emily Qureshi-Hurst: So there are some disagreements about what space time is of a philosophical nature. So the two ways of understanding spacetime are known as substantive and relation is so substantially is the idea that space time is a substance. It's an entity, it exists, it's out there in the world. And even if you took out all of the events, um everything out of it, all of the objects, all of the relations, you would still have something, there's a container there, which is space time within which everything happens. Whereas the relation is says, well, actually spacetime is emerging and it's, it emerges out of the relations between objects and events. So if you take the objects and events out of the universe, there's nothing left, there is no substance, ontological substance of spacetime. Instead, it's just, there's just relations between events. So the debate rages on between these two, I think if I had to hedge my bets, I think I would come down on substantive. But I, I uh I'm saying that with a big pinch of salt, I'm not sure.

18:23 Ricardo Lopes: Right. So I mean, the, the question I'm about to ask you, you've, you've already alluded to some aspects of it throughout our conversation. But uh also for the audience to get a better understanding of how the questions here are interrelated, like questions in physics with questions in theology which for people who are more on the naturalistic end of the spectrum perhaps would be very hard to understand. Uh HOW does spacetime relate to theological questions and what theological questions are we exactly talking about here?

19:06 Emily Qureshi-Hurst: So spacetime as we understand, it is comprised of four dimensions, three dimensions of space and one dimension of time. So all of the questions that we think about relating to God and time must be considered in conversation with space time, I think um we also can think about questions about spatial location. So does God exist at all moments in space? What happened if the Christian religion is right. What happened when God entered space time, it through the incarnation in a way that he wasn't present before is something like that really possible. Uh So those are the kind of spatial questions we might answer. I mean, there's lots more, but those are the kind of primary ones. And then um with relation to God and the time dimension. Yeah, it's, it's largely questions about whether God exists inside time or outside of time. But we also might want to think about what the nature of space time means for human beings and certain theological questions that concern human beings. So, one of the key doctrines in Christianity is the doctrine of salvation. And one of the key things I'm looking at in my book is, can we understand the Christian doctrine of salvation classically conceived in the context of spacetime and do the different interpretations of space time yield different answers to questions about is salvation possible? What does salvation look like? Can there be a scatological redemption and bodily resurrection? So there's a huge number of questions. I mean, as I said before, the nature of time, the nature of space are really foundational in understanding reality and the human beings that live within it. And those are key theological issues. So you, you can't, in my opinion, you can't really do theology without thinking about space time and of course, space time.

20:57 Ricardo Lopes: So let's unpack that a little bit and to do that, let's go through some of the main questions that you explore in your book actually. So starting with the nature of God. So uh first of all, perhaps, let me ask you, what is the uh I mean, what are questions related to the nature of God? What is the problem, let's say of the nature of God, what are we trying to really get at here?

21:25 Emily Qureshi-Hurst: So the God of classical theism is believed to have certain properties um and have those properties maximally. So this is sometimes called perfect being theology. And some of the properties that are often cited are omniscient, which is being all knowing, omnipotent being all powerful, uh omni benevolent being all loving simplicity, meaning not comprised of any component parts, the attributes being essential, the properties um uh Yeah, of one's essence and existence being one and the same. Um So what we're trying to think about with questions of God and time is can which interpretations of time or which understandings of time are compatible with those properties? So different in different understandings of God's relation to time, yield different problems or concerns for some of these properties. And I'm happy to talk through those in uh in more detail. Yeah. So um let's think about the idea that God is inside of time first and then we'll think about God being outside of time. So if God is inside of time, then God is subject to the passage of time, God can only directly experience what is happening now. Um And so let, let's think about some of the problems this might raise. If God is supposed to be all powerful, then this seems to really, really limit God's ability to access and experience parts of time that aren't happening now. This is called the prisoner of time objection. And some people have been really concerned with this idea that God by being temporal would be somehow subservient to time, subject to its passing in a way that doesn't fit with God being all powerful. There are some responses to this. So Richard Swinburne, for example, says that God has chosen to limit his power in this sense because it's theologically worthwhile for God to do so. This was an act of choice. So it's not a limit of God's power. It's an actualization of God's power in a way that some that limits some of the things he can do because there are other benefits that come from it. Um So another problem with God being inside of time is that it seems to make God an object among objects and classically God is thought of as being transcendent. So being outside of and above and far more than the created universe. And so if God is inside of time, then it seems like God is an object among objects. And that doesn't seem to fit with the classical conception of God. So those are a couple of problems. There are more. But um let's stick with those for now. But then there are some benefits to being inside of time. So if you're inside of time, then you can have an ongoing relationship with the creatures or the beings within time. So as a creature or an individual's life unfolds, God can be present in the unfolding of that lifetime. God can act in the world in ways that seem much more easy to understand God can respond to petitionary prayer. Um And so there are, there are benefits that people have seen with the God being inside of time. And what's, what's worth noting here as well is that lots of contemporary theologians are now arguing that actually, if you look at the Bible, that seems to be much more supportive of God being inside of time, even though the classical conception of God is that God is outside of time. And that was the medieval consensus. And the reason for that is that God is understood to be perfect. And Plato made this argument that perfect beings cannot change because any change would be a, a degradation from perfection. If you're already perfect, then the only way is down in a sense. So God needs to be changeless. And if we think of change in time as being intimately connected, then God cannot be temporal, a God who's outside of time is also able to be transcendent, is able to see everything in time at once. And so has perfect knowledge of everything that happens. Whereas the God that's inside of time might only be able to have direct knowledge of what's happening now and can't know the future, which seems to be a limit of knowledge. Um And the, yeah, the God outside of time, I mean, in a sense, yes, it was the, it was largely supported in medieval times. But even now the so called God of the philosophers, the God that philosophers of religion tend to talk about seems to be much more conducive to this idea of God being outside of time. So, um sorry, that was a really long answer. But just unpacking some of the implications of the nature of God and the different temporal models of the God time relationship.

26:06 Ricardo Lopes: So uh let me ask you a question sort of related to that. Uh I mean, this might sound a bit unsophisticated because again, I don't read uh lots of uh literature on theology and philosophy of religion perhaps. But um if uh and please correct me if this idea is wrong, but if the idea is that God created the universe, then I would assume that people would also with that assumption would come, the assumption that God would stand outside of the universe that he created, right? So if that's true, then wouldn't that immediately and necessarily implicate that he also stands outside of space time. And so would necessarily be a temporal,

27:01 Emily Qureshi-Hurst: yes, that is one of the arguments that people make. And I think it's a very powerful one. If God is fundamentally temporal and time is part of physical creation, then there must have been at least some period in God's lifetime where there was no temporal dimension. And so yeah, that's a very good argument. And another argument that's quite similar is according to our understanding of space time, if something has a spatial location, they have a temporal location. And if something has a temporal location, it has a spatial location. But because God is not a spatial or physical being, God does not exist in space and therefore God doesn't exist in time either. So I, I think there's probably more powerful reasons to think that God is outside of time than inside of time if God exists. But I come at it from a philosophical perspective and theologians and biblical scholars tend to prefer the idea that God is inside of time because the Bible seems to talk about God as having a history that unfolds. Uh AND that has and that God dynamically responds to the unfolding of world history in a way that's hard to imagine for a God that's outside of time. So the debates rage on basically.

28:11 Ricardo Lopes: So the nature of God is one question, the second one has to do with human salvation. So in what ways would the problem of spacetime connect to the nature and scope of human salvation?

28:26 Emily Qureshi-Hurst: So I think the best understanding of space and time is one that is consonant with the B theory of time. And this is the block universe view. And so according to the block universe, all moments of space and time exist in a four dimensional in um yeah, four dimensional Minkowski spacetime basically. And what that means is every moment of your life exists. You are in a sense are a four dimensional worm spread out, spread out in space time. Even though we experience only slices that space time in our immediate perception. What this means is the person I was when I was five, the person I was when I was 1217, 25 all of those versions of me exist as well as all of the versions of me that are 30 35 50 7080. If I live that long, one of the things that Christianity is committed to is the idea that we can undergo a process of transformation ie personal salvation that you can go from being fallen at one point in your life to being saved at a later point, or at least begin to be saved. Even if the ultimate salvation happens after the end of the universe or the end of your temporal life. But if all moments of time exist and all versions of you exist, then it's difficult to see how you can actually objectively change from being fallen to being saved. All you can say is you're fallen there and saved there. And that seems to be in my view, in contradiction with what Christianity teaches about the idea of personal salvation. So I think there are ways around this, but they're probably not as robust as the Christian theologian would like. My solution to this is to say, well, we should probably think of salvation as something subjective and phenomenological. So it's a product of our experience, we experience ourselves changing from fallen to being saved. And for us that constitutes personal salvation, even though it doesn't mean that we have objectively changed from fallen to being saved. This works for me. But there are related problems ie the idea that sin is eliminated. So Christianity again teaches that sin will ultimately be eliminated. But if the block universe is the correct understanding of reality, then no past sin is eliminated, it's still there even if we aren't in the same location. So the problem of disappearing sin or the problem of the elimination of evil remains on the block universe. And for that reason, again, some theologians and theists are inclined to say that a different interpretation of spacetime is true. One that's more consonant with the a theory of time. So the idea that there is an objective now and no future and no past. And if that's true, this is called present is, and if present is is true, then it is possible to eliminate past evil. Because once something that ceases to be present, it ceases to exist. And so in that sense, you can undergo an objective change from being fallen to being saved and the sin can vanish out of reality. So in terms of personal salvation, you might be more inclined to be an atheist rather than a B theorist and believe in a understanding of space time. That is not really the kind of understanding that most physicists would endorse either the block universe understanding of space time that's supported by Einstein's relativity theories.

31:51 Ricardo Lopes: A and in a sort of related question, what do we know from physics about the possible end of the universe? And if the universe comes to an end, wherever it might be, what sort of implications would that have for salvation?

32:10 Emily Qureshi-Hurst: So we're not entirely sure whether the universe will come to an end or not, but we think now that it probably will. So there's two end scenarios uh for the universe, one is freeze, which is the heat death of the universe, which is the idea that the universe expands and cools until and everything decays until it's a sort of soup of radiation. Um And nothing can live in such an environment. So that's freeze and fry is the idea that the universe collapses back in on itself in um a big crunch. Basically the opposite of a big bang. So we don't know, this depends on um the amount of matter in the universe and the strength of gravity and the value of the cosmological constant and the expansion of the universe. So there's lots of parameters that go into it. But basically, at the moment, the universe is expanding, we don't know if it's gonna keep expanding forever or if it's going to like a stretched elastic band ricochet back and ultimately collapse back in on itself. Either of these seem to indicate that the universe is going to come to an end. So when we're thinking about other claims within Christianity, like the fact that creation will be transformed into a new creation, or that individuals will undergo bodily resurrection, uh Some, some problems are raised and it's the inverse um of the previous problem in that the A theory is unhelpful and the B theory is helpful. So basically, whichever position the theist takes is a problem. The reason the A theory is problematic for bodily resurrection is that in order for there to be bodily resurrection, you need to have a body. But if the universe comes to an end, then everything is destroyed, there is no body left to be resurrected. So if there are, if there is bodily resurrection, at the end of times, it would have to be the creation of some new body. And that's not what Christianity teaches. But if you're a B theorist, even if the universe comes to an end, at the end of the, the last page in the book of the Block Universe, if you like all moments, still exist. So the body is still retrievable. Bodily resurrection is still possible and creation still exists to be transformed. Christianity doesn't teach about a completely spontaneous new creation and new bodies created out of nothing. That's how this universe came into being. But the idea within Christianity is that this substance, the universe, the beings in it will become transformed at the end of time. And if you have an A theory, then it seems like there's nothing left to be transformed. Once the heat death or big crunch happens, there's nothing. And so that's a, that's a big problem as well. And that's something that scholars in science and religion, which is the discipline that I one of the disciplines I'm in. Uh THEY'VE given this quite a lot of attention and some of them have said, look, we're just gonna have to hope that God intervenes before the end of the universe in order to avoid some of these problems. So it's a, it's a lively area of scholarship. But one of the things I argue in my book is that whether you, if you're a theist, if you're a Christian theist, then space time, space and time itself raises significant problems for salvation and eschatology, either there's no body to be resurrected or sin can't be eliminated. And so you have to really take on both of these problems. If you want to be Christian theist who is engaged with and interested in the nature of time and the auto of space time.

35:34 Ricardo Lopes: And in theology, are there alternatives to bodily resurrection? I mean, could resurrection happen in a, in a non material way, let's say.

35:48 Emily Qureshi-Hurst: Yeah. So it definitely could. I mean, if the idea of an immortal soul or um, something of that nature, but that's not what strictly, that's not what Christianity has historically taught. We might want to, um, as, as theologians, theologians might want to say. Ok, well, we, that previous theology was based on uh knowledge that wasn't informed by science. So maybe we do need to rethink things, maybe bodies will be created completely new out of nothing. Maybe it will be the resurrection of the soul only. But Christians base a lot of their understandings about what happens eschatological on what happened to Jesus and Jesus physical body, the same body with the scars um from being crucified, was resurrected. And so, and that's supposed to be a sign and a symbol of what's to come. So you can try and get out of these problems. But you would have to deviate from some of the core claims of Christianity now because I'm not a Christian. I don't see that as a huge problem. Um But if you're a Christian, that might be quite an unappealing uh road to go down.

36:54 Ricardo Lopes: Mhm But, II, I mean, ju just to see if I, if I understand this, why do we need bodily resurrection for us to have uh things like uh salvation, redemption and basically the elimination of uh sin. Why, why do we need that? Exactly. Well,

37:19 Emily Qureshi-Hurst: I don't think we do need that. I don't think it's necessary, but it's part of the Christian story. So if you are a Christian, you need it because that's what it says in the Bible. Um And if you, if you want to have understandings of life after death that aren't Christian or that are, that take elements of Christianity, but go beyond it, that's totally fine. But an orthodox Christian will say bodily resurrection is a core component of the Christian world view because Jesus died and was risen again. So in that sense, it's a core Christian claim that lots of people don't want to abandon.

37:55 Ricardo Lopes: And uh I, I mean, apart from resurrection, there's also the alternative, if I understood it correctly of a new creation, right? So what would that, sorry, what would that entail? And in what ways would that possibly be constrained by our understanding of space time?

38:19 Emily Qureshi-Hurst: Well, I think the idea of a new creation is best I understand it is that some this physical universe will be transformed into something, um something better, something that fully realizes God's purposes for creation. And in that process, um the problems of this creation will be overcome or redeemed. And so the problem that I'm raising is just and that other people have raised as well is that you need to have a physical cosmos in order to transform it, you need to have the bodies of individual people. If you want to have bodily resurrection, and you need to have this world around us if you want to transform it. And so if the universe does end and everything disappears out of existence, that claim seems pretty hard to just five scientifically. And so some Christians just don't want to engage with the science, some of them engage with the science, but say science has a limit and ultimately theological knowledge and theological understanding should always take precedence over scientific insights. And some people want to take the science very seriously and say, look, maybe we need to reimagine what's supposed to happen theologically because science teaches us uh Xy and Z you know that the universe comes to an end or something.

39:34 Ricardo Lopes: So, uh how do you look at the relationship between science and theology? Because of course, we know that there's a big schism, I guess between the scientists and the theologians or the religious people sometimes. So, uh and it seems to be uh theoretically speaking and intellectually speaking, uh very hard to reconcile them. A at least with the way we approach things nowadays since particularly the enlightenment and so on. So, um how do you look at the relationship and ho how do you think we could perhaps reconcile them and perhaps even through the kinds of questions that you explore in your book,

40:21 Emily Qureshi-Hurst: this is a really, really important question. And I think it's, it's a fascinating one because there's a, there's an academic discipline called science and religion, of which I'm part, which emerged halfway through the 20th century. It was pioneered by physicists who were religious and wanted to engage physics and Christianity primarily with each other. And the discipline now is really broad and really fascinating and, and a very, very lively and dynamic area of scholarship, which I think is gonna be one of the biggest areas of theology moving forward. And, and so in the discipline of science and religion, we see the two as very easily brought into dialogue with each other, perfectly compatible in some areas, obviously not compatible in others. But in the wider, in wider society, the public seem to see science and religion as completely contradictory. Now, this is really interesting, why do scholars in the field see it so differently to the public? And I think part of the reason that that's the case is because of the new atheist movement that was prominent in the early two thousands. But also going back to Victoria England, there are two scholars called Draper and White who publicized and popularized this idea that science and religion are in conflict and are in internal perennial warfare and that they can never be compatible. But you need to make certain assumptions for that to be the case. And a couple of those assumptions are you need to assume that each discipline is fighting over the same territory. So religion is trying to explain everything and science is trying to explain everything. And if they say different things, then there must be a conflict or a clash. And the other one is that science can be neatly defined and clearly bounded and religion can be neatly defined and clearly bounded. And that's not true today or historically. So what we mean by religion has changed so much over time, we didn't even have the term religion. 100 years ago, we just had the Latin term religio, which meant personal piety. It was after Europeans explored and colonized other cultures and saw different spiritual practices that they realized, ok, maybe there's something we need to name here, that's, that mirrors Christianity in certain ways and that's where the idea of religion or world religions came about. But how religion was defined was really deeply affected by this Eurocentric Christian centric understanding of what religion is. So religion is belief, religion is about belief in God. Um Religion is primarily text based. Uh WHEREAS lots of religions are actually more about spiritual practice, about ritual, about community. And if you define religion in that way, it's difficult to see how it can be in contradiction with science. And similarly, it assumes that science has a single perspective on important issues that can be in conflict with religion. But we know that that's not true because scientists disagree all the time about the correct interpretation of the data about which theories are right. So for example, uh drawing from my own work on quantum mechanics, there are several empirically equivalent interpretations of quantum mechanics, each of which paints a completely different picture of reality. So the ever in many worlds interpretation says that reality is comprised of uh a multiverse where the universe branches into a multiplicity of other universes every second. Uh And then you have the Copenhagen interpretation which says something completely different that just says the universe exists. Um And there's a level of quantum randomness at its most fundamental level. And these are two radically different physical theories that interpret the same data and the same mathematics. So there is no scientific perspective that can be in conflict with religion because there is no religious perspective either that contradicts with science. So that's, that's why um I don't think, I think it's a common misconception that science and religion are incompatible and I think actually they're not, but that doesn't mean that there's perfect synergy between them far from it. You do see certain religious groups who are very, very skeptical or even distrusting of science. So we saw that recently in the COVID pandemic, um evangelicals in the United States were very, very wary of the vaccine and didn't want to engage with modern science, didn't trust that the experts had their best interests at heart. We also see it with certain religious groups and evolution as well. Denying that evolution is the correct explanation of the origin of humanity and the origin of species on earth. And we also see some scientists painting religion as backwards looking or dogmatic or um run by corrupt authorities. And I mean, in a sense, there are some, there are a lot of very religious authorities out there. So there are of course elements of tension between science and religion and there are individual ideas that come into conflict with each other. But the relationship between science and religion is so much more complex and rich and nuanced than that. So that's the first thing I'd like to say that it's a common misconception that science and religion are in conflict. They don't have to be it. That idea relies on certain assumptions that you can't justify as for their actual relationship. I think it's really difficult to characterize it in one neat single way because science is so broad because religion is so broad and because throughout history, they've had periods where science um was largely funded by religion. So the Catholic church funded lots of early modern science. Then you've had periods where religion and science or religious people and scientific minds came into conflict particularly over evolution when it was first um proposed. So I think the best way of characterizing the science and religion relationship is one of complexity. This is an idea put forward by the Historian of Science, John Hedley Brook. So you said that science and religion are so deeply rooted in human concerns and human endeavor that we can't extract them from the context in which they emerge and say science relates to religion in this way. Instead, we have to look at this messy complexity of religious ideas, scientific ideas, philosophical ideas, and the individual historical actors that brought those ideas into dialogue. So I think science and religion can be seen as mutually enriching as uh foils to each other um as ways to sharpen each other's ideas. And i it's really difficult to say in a nutshell what the relationship is. But I do think there's a real value in interdisciplinary scholarship. Science and religion are two of the primary ways, big narratives, huge ideas that humans have come up with to explain our place in the world. And so it's really fascinating to bring those together. How has 2000 years of theological history understood the nature of the human being and the nature of the reality in which we live? How has science understood these similar questions? And are there resonances between them? So this, it's a really, really productive area of scholarship that I would encourage anyone who's interested to delve deeper into. There's a lot of compatibility there and when there is friction when there is conflict, it's really interesting to get into the nitty gritty of that as well.

47:27 Ricardo Lopes: Uh But there's also a third pillar here that is philosophy. So how would you look at uh philosophy in relation to science and theology? I mean, is it at the intersection of both or where would you place it?

47:45 Emily Qureshi-Hurst: So philosophy is definitely its own discipline and it predates the other two. So uh philosophy has a really rich and informative history that has tackled pretty much all of the big and important questions that we have about ourselves and about the world that we live in. So difficult questions. Like what's the nature of the good? Uh How do we live a good life? How do we become virtuous? How should we live together in a society to questions about identity? You know, what does it take for an individual to be the same individual across time? Um What does ultimate reality consist in? Is there something beyond this material plane? Can everything be reduced down to material causes a material matter? Or is everything actually existing in the mind of an evil demon? I mean, philosophy's philosophies come up with loads of really interesting conversations and questions relating to reality. So it's definitely not just at the intersection of science and religion, but that being said, I think it's the most useful tool when you doing science and religion. So other other science and religion, scholars disagree and prefer to engage pure science with pure theology. I think philosophy is really valuable because it's like a common language you can translate them both into. So you can say here's the science, let's distill that to a set of philosophical principles or philosophical arguments, claims. And we can do the same with religion. And then suddenly, instead of having two things that exist on very different planes and that it's hard to easily bring them into conversation. You can say, well, what are the philosophical ideas that are at stake here? How can we bring those into dialogue? Can we find a synthesis between them or ultimately, is there gonna be some irresolvable incompatibility between particular ideas? And that's what I do in my own work. I think, I think of myself as a philosopher who does science and religion and philosophy in my view is the perfect tool in order to bring these fascinating disciplines into dialogue.

49:42 Ricardo Lopes: So I I know that you, you'll also have a new book coming out later this year in August. If I'm not mistaken, salvation in the block universe. So would you like to give us perhaps a teaser?

49:56 Emily Qureshi-Hurst: Yeah. So salvation in the block universe actually explores a lot of the themes that we've been discussing today. So my Cambridge element, God salvation and the problem of space time is a general introduction to these ideas. I set out uh the history of the philosophy of time. I talk about the physics of space time and then how God and time interact and also how salvation can be influenced by our understanding of space time. What salvation in the block universe does is takes the block universe understanding of spatial temporal reality and says, what does this mean for personal salvation? So it's a much more in depth exploration of the problem of salvation in the B block universe. So I, I do talk about some of the ideas in my but God salvation and the problem of space this time. But in salvation of the block universe, I'm really going to a lot more detail and I use uh Paul Tillich 20th century theologian as a dialogue partner there. And Tli has this brilliant theological methodology that he calls the method of correlation. And that's the method that I use in my book. So the method of correlation says that theology only works when it's in dialogue with culture. So what theologians need to do is look at culture, look at the contemporary culture that they're in and say what are the important questions that are arising out of this culture ferilli, these were existential questions. And so his theology is very deeply informed by existentialism. But for me, I was looking um at at philosophy particularly and seeing that questions about time, temporal reality and space time are some of the pressing conceptual questions that we are dealing with. And so I begin with the physics and philosophy of space time and the block univer. And then I go on to talk about the implications for salvation. So anyone who's interested in the book that we've been discussing today will hopefully find the book that I'm releasing in August. Similarly interesting. It goes, it's a deeper dive into some of these questions.

51:55 Ricardo Lopes: So, and of course, I'm leaving a link to the book we've been discussing today God salvation and the problem of space time in the description of the interview. And would you also like to tell people where they can find you and the rest of your work on the internet?

52:11 Emily Qureshi-Hurst: Yeah, that's right. So, um I have a Twitter, it's E Qureshi Hurst and I tweet about all things science, philosophy, theology, and also a bit about my life as well. Um I have a Google Scholar page where you can find all of my papers. So you just type in my name, Emily Qureshi Hurson to Google my Google scholar page will be there. Uh Quite a few of my papers are open access so they can be read by anybody. And um yeah, I, I hope that people will be interested in these ideas and explore them further.

52:44 Ricardo Lopes: Great. So Doctor Kihi Hurst, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show again and it was really a pleasure to talk with you.

52:53 Emily Qureshi-Hurst: Thank you so much for inviting me. Uh It's been, it's been really great. Thanks so much.

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