#125 Emily Qureshi-Hurst - Does God Know What Time It Is?

26:08Emily Qureshi-Hurst:So why the popularity of the atemporal God before, and why the shift? So there's a few arguments that we could give. Some of them are rooted in Platonic philosophy. So the idea that God is a perfect being means, Plato made this argument, that something that's perfect doesn't change because if it changes, it in some way degrades from perfection. So if God is perfect, then God doesn't change. And if we think of time and change as linked together, then God is outside of time. God isn't subject to the passage of time. Why would change require degradation from perfection? This was something that jumped out at me from reading your work.

26:46Emily Qureshi-Hurst:I understand that in a sense. It sounds plausible, but it also seems plausible to me that there are ways of changing that don't improve or detract. I mean, is there something necessary about change that would detract? Well, not necessarily. So one of the objections is that from the temporalist is to say, there's no change in God's perfection if his knowledge changes from the time is two o 'clock to the time is one minute past two. And that's the kind of change that's required for God to be a temporal being, so there's no challenge to his perfection. I think the perfection and change argument is one of the weaker ones for the atemporalists, but it had a powerful sway over people in history.

27:26Emily Qureshi-Hurst:Yeah. Can we make sense of the question, does God know what time it is right now? And do we require, in order to say yes, do we require that God is temporal? Or can you have an atemporal God who knows what time it is right now because i'm speaking in a temporal sense i'm in the temporal world yeah could a timeless god know what time it is now yes but if you're if you endorse the idea of a timeless god you normally uh in in contemporary discourse at least endorse a view of time that says there is no what time there is no time that it is now objectively so an atemporal god knows what time it is at all points in space-time.

28:09But there is no objective now. It's called the block universe for you. I can talk a bit more about what that is. Whereas a temporal God knows what time it is now, because normally you would have this marriage of a temporal God and a version or a theory of time where time does objectively pass and there is a now. So God knows what time it is now. And that knowledge is continuously changing as time passes in the future, becomes present and goes to the past. But if you endorse an atemporal God, you think of the relationship generally between God and time as one, a bit like an author holding their book or like a novel.

28:45All the pages exist, all of the events that happen to the characters, each moment in the character's life is all there. And God knows all of those things that happen and can look at any point. And there is no objective, oh, it's objectively page 33 now. That doesn't make sense when you think about a novel. And so this is the version of time that goes with the timeless God. And it's the version of time or theory of time that I think is best supported by modern physics.

29:11Emily Qureshi-Hurst:I mean, the character in the novel could say like, you know, what page number am I on? Yeah. And there is no objective page number for the author, but the author can know where they were when they said that. And that might be, you know, God would know where I am on this time block. I think most people will be roughly familiar with the idea of the block universe versus you know the part where the past and the future and the present all exist on this big block versus the idea that the past doesn't exist the present is the only thing that exists and the future doesn't exist yet some people might even know that they are broadly referred to as respectively the b theory and the a theory or the b series and a series of time um but there is also a c series of time isn't there what is the c series of time so the a theory b theory c theory or A series, B series, C series come from a 1908 paper by J.M.E.

30:05McTaggart called On the Unreality of Time or The Unreality of Time. And he draws a distinction between three different ways that you can describe positions in time. We've already talked about the A series and B series, so I don't need to go over that again. The C series, well, maybe I will just so I can show the difference. So the A series describes positions in time by virtue of their possessing objective properties of past, present or future. The B series says time can be fundamentally accounted for by giving relations of before, after, than and simultaneous. So you've got these two place relations.

30:40And the C series says all you need to describe time are these three place relations of temporal betweenness. So what that really means is that you have this series of time, of moments in time, and they have a particular order with respect to how they're arranged, but there's no objective direction so it's a bit like the colors of the spectrum you can start with red and move to the blue end or you can start with the blue end and move to the red end and so what that means the c theory of time is also committed to a block universe it says all moments of time exist tenselessly but it doesn't you don't have to read the universe as it were from uh the big bang to the heat death if the universe is going to end in a heat death it makes just as much sense fundamentally to read the universe from the heat death to the big bang and even within those different theories there are different interpretations of the theory so i mean

31:35Emily Qureshi-Hurst:it's quite hard to wrap your head around exactly what we're talking about but we said the a series says that you know the present exists the past doesn't exist anymore the future is yet to come there is no block but there are more than one way there is more than one way of interpreting what that means what the a series is and there's sort of three popular broad distinctions right within a theory of time that's right i think the most the one that i see most often endorsed is presentism which is the a theory you just described so all that exists is the present so you need an objective now and everything that's simultaneous to that now exists nothing else exists then you have what's called the growing block theory which is committed to the existence of the present and says that the past exists.

32:22So as new slices of time that are the present come into existence, when they become past, they are then added to a block, like the block universe, but that grows with ever more present moments. The future is not real. And then you have the moving spotlight, which is also committed to a block universe like the B and C theory, but says that there's something, and I'm not really clear about what that's supposed to be, that picks out objective nows, a bit like if you had a street of houses and you have a spotlight that moves from one house to the other there's something privileged about the house that's being lit up and that's the idea with the moving spotlight view so it tries to have the best parts of the b theory and the best parts of the a theory and in so doing i think it comes up with something that basically no one endorses yeah but

33:10Emily Qureshi-Hurst:then i mean i like this idea of like privileging the present because there is something special about now, by which I mean, there was when I said the word now. But even for the B theorists who thinks that all time exists and the past and the present are just as real, surely they still can't escape the idea that there is, for want of a better term, something privileged about what at least we consciously call the present. How do they make sense of the psychological experience of time if the present exists just as much as the past does? Yeah, that's the biggest objection to the B theory and I guess the C theory as well, is how do we account for our temporal experience?

33:51My response to that is always, well, our experience deceives us all the time. I feel like I'm sitting on a solid chair. I can feel the velvet underneath my fingers. But actually, this chair is made up of mostly empty space and it's the atoms in my body reacting or like repelling the atoms in this chair. and so our experience has evolved in the context of the environment of early evolutionary adaptation and hasn't evolved to be able to pick up things like the ontology of time in a way that's reliable enough in my view to go against what science tells us about time so i think the b theory is best supported by science um and therefore i'm more skeptical of my experience of course from my experiential perspective now feels incredibly privileged it's the only thing i can directly experience but that doesn't mean that the other moments of time aren't real i can't

34:45Emily Qureshi-Hurst:directly experience india right now but it doesn't mean india doesn't exist it just means i'm not there yeah yeah and it seems like less of a mystery to explain right probably just because you feel like if i wanted to i could get up and go to india yeah in a way that i can't like get up and go to the past but that shouldn't change the the nature of what we're talking about um okay so actually i was going to say back to theology but just before that you said a couple of times now that you think the b theory is best supported by science is that because of relativity or is it something else yeah so the a theory is committed to this absolute present moment as i've said a few times now um and that requires there to be a universal plane of simultaneity such that everything that exists can be simultaneous with the now.

35:32According to special relativity and later general relativity this isn't the case in the world or in the universe. We just don't realise because we never either accelerate to significant fractions at the speed of light or go to planets or much closer to the sun with big gravitational fields. If we did that then we would realise that time passes at different rates depending on your speed and depending on your proximity to a gravitational field. We see this in the film Interstellar, when somebody goes onto a massive planet and then goes back to the spaceship. For the person on the spaceship, 20 years has passed, whereas for the people on the planet, it was like an hour or something.

36:13And that's not just science fiction, that's solid relativistic physics. And therefore, if that's the case, then we don't have this universal simultaneity, and we don't have this objective now. Yeah.

36:25Emily Qureshi-Hurst:And without getting into it too deeply, we should flag that there are people, the so-called Lorentzian view of space-time, Neo-Lorentzian, I don't know what Lawrence refers to, who do try to reconcile the A-theory of time with the mathematics of special and general relativity, right? Like, they do exist, but you just don't place much plausibility into that. Like, William Lane Craig is an example, right? You write about him, I've spoken to him about this. I think years ago when I spoke to him and asked him about God's relationship to time and he just said well God was timeless and then when he created the universe he entered into time and became temporal and I was sort of like huh yeah like what uh and and I still quite sort of haven't quite wrapped my head around it maybe that's just me um but you think that doesn't make sense to me either no if you if God was timeless before creation then God is in a temporal relation with creation even before creation is existing and therefore he's temporal.

37:24And this is an objection that's been raised to Craig and he hasn't come up with a compelling response in my opinion. But he's an atheist. I think it's one of the things that he believes most deeply about the world and therefore has to come up with a way to explain relativistic physics. So he's devised this Neo-Lorentzian interpretation. It's very much his baby. And it's Lorentzian in that Lorenz was committed, this physicist in the early 20th century, to the existence of a background structure that functions as an absolute frame of reference against which you can measure the absolute passage of time.

37:59Emily Qureshi-Hurst:Like an ether. Yes, it was the luminiferous ether, which was famously disproved by the Mickelson-Morley experiment. So that's why it's neo-Lorentzianism, because it's saying, well, we like this idea that Lorentz had, but we're not going to commit to the ether. We know that doesn't exist. So we're going to try and find another background structure. But really, Craig's arguments are theological in nature so he believes that god must be temporal and that there must be an a theory of time for theological reasons and unfortunately for craig the neo-lorentian interpretation of special relativity has not really taken off anywhere outside of the philosophy of religion scientists have reviewed it and not really taken it seriously i see okay so now actually back to theology outside of the context of just william lane craig um most people have thought about an eternal god however some problems start springing up when you think god is outside of time for example most uh religious traditions certainly a religion like christianity believe believes that god interacts with human beings there are prophets who communicate with god god sends a message and of course god sends jesus to save us from our sins there's this kind of interaction with with a temporal world like is it just a divine mystery, how that happens?

39:17Emily Qureshi-Hurst:Am I mistaken to think that there's some kind of potential contradiction to be drawn out there? Is there something I'm missing? Or is that a little bit weird? Yeah, that is a little bit weird. And this is one of the reasons why a temporal god has seen a resurgence in recent years, because it seems quite difficult to understand how you could have a truly atemporal god that acts in time. And I think there have been some responses, but none of them have been that convincing, I don't think. And so there's a guy, Ryan Mullins, who's written a lot about this, and he says, because of this, it's not even plausible to be an atemporalist about God and a Christian.

39:51You have to be a temporalist if you are a Christian. And actually, he thinks you have to be a presentist.

39:55Emily Qureshi-Hurst:Is Ryan Mullins the guy who thinks that time is like a property of God? Or it's like the same thing as God in the way that classical theologians think of power and love as part of God's nature? Time is sort of a similar thing? Yeah. what's that about how does that work what does it mean say time is like a property of of god i'm not quite sure it's difficult to kind of cash out it's hard it's hard to understand and it's a it's a response in part to this idea that a temporal god isn't truly sovereign so god is believed to be all-powerful ruler of all yeah and yet if he's subject to the passage of time then it seems like there's something external to god um that is in some way has power over God or control over God.

40:43And so this is called the prisoner of time objection. And Mullins says that's a misunderstanding of the temporalist view. Actually, God isn't imprisoned by time because time is a property or a concomitant of God. I see.

40:55Emily Qureshi-Hurst:So it's a strategy similar to how people respond to the Euthyphro dilemma, right? You say, is it good because God commands it or does God command it because it's good? And the Christians say, ah, hold your horses. God is good. It's like the same thing. It flows from his nature. And time is the same thing to respond to this problem. There are other strategies like Richard Swinburne you write about. He sort of says that, yeah, God is temporal. And in a way, by becoming temporal, he does enslave himself to time, but he does so willingly in the same way that he willingly becomes a human and limits his power in that respect.

41:27Emily Qureshi-Hurst:As long as he does it willingly, it's not an indictment on his power. And that allows us to resolve problems of free will, for example. If human beings are free, but God knows exactly what they're going to do with 100 % accuracy, how are they really free? Well, maybe God doesn't know what you're going to do, not because he can't, but because he chose not to. That's a really interesting response to that problem. Is that a viable or the only viable response to this classic age-old problem of God's foreknowledge, his omniscience, is one of his important qualities with this existence of human free will, which is incredibly important to most religious traditions.

42:04One other solution is to be an atemporalist about God and say, God doesn't see what you're doing before you do it because he's not in any before relations with you. He just sees it as it happens, but he sees all moments of time. Another one is to say that God has middle knowledge. So he knows all of the potential things that you could do and what you are likely to do and knows all of the different paths that the world can take, but doesn't know for sure. I think that's the view. I'm not sure if I'm characterizing that exactly right.

42:38Emily Qureshi-Hurst:It's complicated at best. And I mean, I'm fascinated by your work on time and God. And I'd recommend people, they can read the essays that you've written on it just for free online. They're like on your website. The book's a bit broader in scope. One other thing that you mentioned a little while ago now was Christian eschatology. you briefly mentioned the idea that the universe might be heading heading towards a heat death or a big freeze like we're not entirely sure how the universe will end but it seems like what's likely going to happen is that entropy increases atoms vibrate and bounce around and after a long enough time they just become set in this state of equilibrium complete darkness atoms equally spread across the universe and that's just like where it ends just remains like that for eternity maybe the universe is going to collapse back in on itself in a big crunch whatever But whatever the case, we're not going to be like, you know, running around holding hands on planet Earth for the next hundred billion years.

43:34Emily Qureshi-Hurst:Yeah. Even if I stress for those who are already commenting about it, even if we build a spaceship and a wormhole and go to another planet at some point, the whole universe gone. Yeah. christian eschatology suggests that at some point in the future mankind will be you know like resurrected from the dead and there'll be like the new jerusalem and all of this kind of stuff in the popular imagination people imagine like heaven as being this place you go to when you die that's in the spiritual realm but christian literature seems to suggest a quite physical, embodied, temporal resurrection of the dead, right?

44:14Emily Qureshi-Hurst:And so if that's the case, firstly, why is it that if scripture talks about people being physically resurrected from the graves and walking around, do people have this idea that when you die, you go to heaven and it's like somewhere way up there in the sky? And secondly, what is the new Jerusalem going to do to combat the heat death of the universe? So this is a big problem and science and religion scholars were thinking about it about 20 years ago. And I don't think it's sort of faded out of the discourse a little bit, and I'm trying to bring the conversation back. So Christianity is committed to two things, which you just touched upon, a new creation and bodily resurrection.

44:53And both of those are supposed to be based upon or mirror or are foreshadowed by the resurrection of Christ. So Christ was killed, according to the story, rose again, bore the scars of his crucifixion. It was the same physical body he could be touched but there were some changes he could appear in rooms with locked doors there was something about his body that was new but it was the same body and then the promise as well is that there'll be a new creation which will be a physical temporal creation in some sense but spiritual in others it's it's not exactly clear christians are happy to retreat into mystery for some of that but the issue with the heat death or the big crunch is that it seems to destroy all the stuff you need for both of those things.

45:42So to have a new creation, you need the stuff of creation to transform. Otherwise, you're not transforming and redeeming this creation, you're just making a new one. And if you're just making a new perfect creation, why don't you do that in the first place? Why create this world at all? And the same with bodily resurrection. The promise is that this physical body is going to be resurrected as Christ was. But the problem is, his was resurrected after three days. and I mean it's been we've had humans around for tens of thousands hundreds of thousands of years if the claim is that all of those are going to be bodily resurrected most of the bodies have decayed yeah so that even that's a problem on earth and then when you get to the heat death of the universe you have no physical stuff from which to resurrect these bodies so it's a theological problem and I think it's more of a problem if you're a presentist than a block theorist how come so

46:35Emily Qureshi-Hurst:if you're a presentist the past doesn't exist but if you're a block theorist the past does exist so okay you've got the heat death over here but over here you've got my body that died a couple of days ago you can raise that so it seems like the material uh of the universe in presentism when the final act of the universe happens everything's finished it's gone it's out of existence whereas on the with according to the block universe you just have the last page in the novel but the rest of the novel still exists yeah but there is this problem of like i mean i can't remember who it is that that writes about this but there's all kinds of discussion about the nature of the resurrected body and one interesting thing is the fact that physically speaking our our atoms seem to replenish themselves i mean they they say that you know every atom changes every seven years that's not quite accurate there are some parts of us that seem to remain almost for all of our lives but a lot of it changes right to the extent that it seems that i could take my 10 year old self and my 80 year old self and they'll be made out of completely different sets of atoms okay like b theory of time both of those times just exist in theory i could resurrect the 10 year old version of me put all of those atoms back together and pull it up and take the 80 year old version of me and put all those atoms together and pull it up and you'd have two me's walking around and they would both be the resurrected version of me which doesn't seem quite right you know like i'm not really sure how that works in christian eschatology so i guess maybe the problems the philosophical problems for material resurrection for christianity are deeper and extend beyond like the heat death stuff because i suppose you could just posit that like it will all just be new you know there's just going to be a new material universe and then why create this universe in the first place well that's kind of a question for christianity anyway isn't it?

48:23Emily Qureshi-Hurst:Even absent the heat death, like why bother with the veil of tears? Why not heaven now, they say is the objection. So maybe it's not particular to time.

48:35Emily Qureshi-Hurst:The second topic that you cover in the book after doing creation, which we've touched on, is design. Probably most famously connected to the findings of science is the issue of design in religion you know be it because uh william paley looks at the design of a complex animal and compares it to a watch and thinks it must have had a creator or be it because design is the great argument that is undercut by evolution and natural selection we spoke earlier about the conflict thesis not being particularly accurate science and religion don't really hate each other in the way that people think they do but when it comes specifically to the idea that there must be design in the universe because of the complexity of life.

49:22Emily Qureshi-Hurst:And then you get a scientific explanation for complexity of life. Is that an instance where science and religion really are in conflict? So I'm hesitant to say anything about science as a whole and religion as a whole, but I definitely don't want to say that scientific ideas and religious ideas don't come into conflict. They absolutely do. And that's a good example of a scientific idea coming in and basically refuting a religious argument. William Paley thought that the intricate and harmonious natural world and the fact that predator and prey seem perfectly designed to this battle that they're always in, and nature seems very balanced, must be the evidence of a perfect design.

50:04Of course, Darwin comes along and says, well actually they evolved together over millions of years um the the what's the phrase like the muscles of the gazelle were shaped on the tooth of the lion that kind of thing and so in that in that instance yeah that that particular argument from design was basically refuted by evolution so there's a couple of options one is to say well make more general claims about design and don't make anything that's too specifically scientific in case science comes along and refutes it or to just say okay well maybe we don't find evidence of design in evolution but let's look at physics and we see cosmic fine-tuning and there it seems like the physical constants the initial conditions are perfectly suited to the emergence of life and there was a huge range of possible values those could have had and the life-permitting value is like infinitesimally small in the broad range of possibilities.

50:59And I just think what you're doing there is making the same mistake Paley did. Just because we don't know why those values have the values that they have, or those constants have the values that they have now, doesn't mean that we won't find out in the future. It's basically God of the gaps reasoning. It's the weakest form of science and religion interaction, religious argument in my view.

51:18Emily Qureshi-Hurst:I don't know what your take broadly on the fine-tuning argument is. I mean, there's one sense in which you can treat it as a God of the gaps. So you could say, we have this problem, I don't know how to solve it, therefore God. But you could try to take a non-gappy approach. You could say, well, there are things we do know about the universe, that the constants are finely tuned. We also know that there are only three explanations, design, chance, or necessity. We have reasons to rule out this and this, and so we're left with design. So there's a version of this argument which might not be just a God of the gaps.

51:48But for me, the interesting question has always been, why are the meta conditions set up in this way?

51:55Emily Qureshi-Hurst:my friend phil halper talks about this a lot where if we had a god who wanted to create the universe for human life why would the meta conditions be such that it's like the most improbable thing that could possibly happen you know like what we're like if he can do absolutely anything and we're talking about physical laws here like god is presumably not bound by the strong nuclear force for example or the strength of gravity or the expansion rate so why would he do that And Phil's big take is that the Gnostic Christian theology, that there's an evil demiurge creator of the material world and a good spiritual God, explains it perfectly.

52:32Emily Qureshi-Hurst:Because the good God didn't want humans to come into existence materially. He didn't want the material world to exist because it's evil. So he made it as unlikely as possible. But then the demiurge figured out how to do it anyway. And so you can kind of take this in any way, shape or form that you like. but what do you think about the thrust because having said all of that and having said oh science might explain it one day and maybe it's better in line with gnostic theology it is weird that these constants that are fundamental to the universe's existence not the distance of the earth from the sun because there are billions of planets but the you know the the strength of gravity that allows atoms to form is on a knife edge is that is that at least pro-theism or are you so sort of confident that it makes the paley mistake that you know you think it shouldn't even really count in favor of theism i found it the most persuasive argument for theism when i first came into contact with it but then uh i thought a bit more about it and looked at the evidence that we might be living in a multiverse.

53:39And that seems to strip away all of the probabilistic weight to the fine-tuning argument. So if we are living in a multiverse, where if it's an infinite multiverse, then everything that can happen does happen in either distant bubbles of universe domains or expanding, contracting universes for all of time, or however the universe is configured. Then of course there will be a universe that's conducive to life and that's why we happen to be in it because everything that can happen does happen i think if the universe a similar point to the point your friend made if the universe was designed with life in mind we've looked at a lot of other planets now in our vicinity and we've not found anything yet i said earlier i think we're going to find it at some point i think it's very unlikely that life isn't out there but if the universe was designed for life why don't we see life in

54:28Emily Qureshi-Hurst:abundance would you think if if we could somehow prove that there were no life in the universe i don't know how but in principle and it really did just evolve on earth would you take that as evidence for theism given that it seems all other things being equal if life can evolve on a planet it should be able to do it in loads of places but it only happened here once because the universe wasn't designed for life but for human life in particular and for whatever reason these other universes are created. And a lot of people say, well, that's a bit wasteful. Why create Jupiter if no one's going to live there?

55:02Emily Qureshi-Hurst:But then I can say, why create the Atlantic Ocean if no one's going to live there? Maybe there's some reason that we don't understand, but do you take that as evidence for theism or would you think it wouldn't really change your mind? If it's evidence for theism, it's evidence for a strange kind of God, in my view. I know you've already made this point already, but why would God create a potentially infinitely expansive universe just for humans just create the solar system or even just create one galaxy if there's aesthetic value in all of the different iterations of different planets different values uh sorry like different compositions of minerals on the planet and the atmosphere and all of that if there's beauty in that for god's sake that god can enjoy then fine but why such an expansive universe if it's just for humans and why would the earth be 4.5 billion years old if humans have only been alive for 200 ,000 years.

55:55If the point was humans, why not put us there from the beginning?

55:58Emily Qureshi-Hurst:Yeah, that's a difficult thing to square, I suppose. And maybe that's part of the motivation for a resurgence in biblical literalism, young earth creationism, because it's not so much that science comes along and disproves something that the Bible said. Science comes along and says the earth is 4.5 billion years old. people start to think what was the point in that why why did why did he bother with all of that why were there billions of years of evolution species just suffering and dying so that eventually we could come about and then maybe that's more the motivation for biblical literalism rather than people who just naturally think that's how the how the text should be read um do you think there is any plausibility in the literalist reading of the Bible, not in terms of its truth, but in terms of reading the Bible and thinking, this is how we're supposed to be reading this.

56:58Emily Qureshi-Hurst:You know, earth is 6 ,000 years old. The seven days are literal. I mean, some people have pointed to the fact that when the Bible's talking metaphorically, it tends to make it quite clear, you know, or it might literally use poetry, for example, but the language of Genesis might be more comparable to the language of Exodus, which also didn't happen probably, but at least we read it as though the Bible's trying to tell us that it did. So do you think there's any legitimacy in a fundamentalist reading of the Bible as the intention of the authors? Well, the only way that's the case is if the author of Genesis 1 is different from and unaware of the authorship of Genesis 2 and the content of Genesis 2.

57:38because the order in which things are created in Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 is not the same. So humanity is created last in Genesis 1 and first in Genesis 2. And in Genesis 2, Adam names all the animals as we talked about earlier. So if biblical literalism is the way to go, why is there a contradiction, a flat out contradiction between book 1 and book 2 of the Bible? Surely the biblical authors were aware of that. I mean, that might be in and of itself an indication that maybe we should be reading this metaphorically.

58:07Emily Qureshi-Hurst:Yeah, I mean, you're kind of left with, the biblical literalist is left with two problems there, which is like either the Bible literally just contradicts itself intentionally, because no one could do that by accident, or the author of Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 weren't aware of each other for some reason. That seems like an insoluble problem, although someone's probably solving it in the comment section right now. um so one question in closing then is just because we've sort of touched on areas where there might be some conflict might be some harmony and you said earlier importantly i like to make this distinction as well that it's not that science conflicts with religion but certain scientific findings conflict with certain religious doctrines given that and the answer might just simply be like no but do you think there are any findings of science and you can count anything from the beginning of the scientific method, but like Galileo onwards, anything that science has sort of discovered that we now widely accept is true, that does conflict with or challenge significantly a specific doctrine of Christianity, but one that is quite fundamental or important.

59:16Emily Qureshi-Hurst:Is there anything that science conflicts with doctrinally that Christians kind of just can't let go of, or can they just coast through the history of science with ease? It's difficult to answer because for some versions of Christianity, there'll be loads of things that science contradicts like creation of the universe, creation of humanity. But I do think by and large, what Christianity is about for what is in my view, the more sophisticated version of Christianity is about this broad relationship of dependence between where we started, between a creator and creation and the creatures within it.

59:57And so it's I think that the empirical claims that Christianity makes are less important than the moral spiritual ones. However, if science could demonstrably prove, I don't know how it ever could, if it could prove that there was no resurrection, that's a thread that if pulled, I think, causes everything to unravel.

1:00:18Emily Qureshi-Hurst:Interesting. So it might be the so-called historical science that is the only true refuge for the militant atheist who really wants to use science to disprove religion. I mean, Christians have always quite openly said that's the test case. It's like, just find the bones of Jesus and we'll hang up our hats. Although I wonder if they actually would. I wonder what would really happen there if that came to be. Speaking of which, just out of interest for people, I mean, you've already mentioned that you don't believe in God, that you're not a theist. But obviously, you've studied theology in depth and you have a great understanding of science as well.

1:00:52Emily Qureshi-Hurst:I don't know if you use the word atheist, non-believer, whatever, but are you so inclined just because you're sort of uncompelled by the kind of arguments we've been talking about or is it because there are like positive atheism arguments that also you find a bit convincing ultimately it's not about arguments for me that factors in i mean if we if we're going to talk about arguments the biggest one for me is the problem of evil i can't see evidence of a good god in the world um but i don't think we get to choose what we believe sometimes i think it'd be really nice to believe in God. You get a community through a church, comfort when people die.

1:01:28Emily Qureshi-Hurst:Not to mention eternal life. Yeah, exactly. It's great. But I grew up with my grandparents, a Christian, my granddad was a priest. And I went to Sunday school a lot. I grew up in church environments. And then I went on to study theology. And now I'm a philosopher slash theologian. I've exposed myself to the most convincing versions of these arguments and the most sophisticated versions of religion in my view and i just can't bring myself to think that it's true and i don't think i have any choice in that really well emily kreshe hurst the articles the books the links will all be in the description for people to to go and follow up on i would particularly recommend that people i mean the book isn't out yet but the the stuff on time and god is is is fascinating and i think you're the you're the go-to person when it comes to that particular issue so i'll make sure that's all linked down in the description for people to listen to but thanks so much for taking the time it's been fun thank you so much for having me it's been great