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

Within Reason

Alex J O'Connor

Religion, Morality, Ethics, Society & Culture, Cosmicskeptic, Religion & Spirituality, Philosophy

4.9 • 1.8K Ratings

🗓️ 12 October 2025

⏱️ 62 minutes

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Summary

Dr. Qureshi-Hurst is a Philosopher of Religion and Science at the University of Cambridge. Her work focuses on the relationship between physics—and time in particular—and theology. Her forthcoming book, Decoding the Cosmos: God, Physics, and the Search for Deeper Explanation, explores this relationship in depth.

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TIMESTAMPS:

0:00 - Does the Bible Predict the Big Bang?2:37 - Scientists and Theologians10:18 - Where Did Biblical Literalism Come From?17:31 - How Does Science Conflict with Theology?23:47 - Does God Experience Time?29:27 - The A, B and C Series of Time38:38 - Timeless God, Timed Universe42:52 - Christianity and the End of the Universe48:35 - Intelligent Design and Modern Science55:58 - Is Biblical Literalism a Plausible Reading?58:32 - Why Emily is an Atheist

Transcript

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0:00.0	Modern science gives us some indication that the universe, at least our universe, probably had some kind of beginning.
0:08.8	Most people think that the Big Bang is at least the beginning of our universe and maybe the beginning of everything that materially exists.
0:17.5	When the Big Bang theory came onto the scene, a lot of people, including Pope Pius at the time, said,
0:25.7	aha, well, here we found it, scientific proof of what the Bible said all along,
0:29.4	which is that God created the universe and one big speech act.
0:34.3	Is that an accurate picture?
0:36.5	Is the Bible predictive of a universe that began at a particular
0:40.3	point in time? So yes and no. It depends who you ask. As with a lot of theological
0:48.9	questions, questions about biblical interpretation, different people will have different
0:52.6	opinions depending on whether they are
0:54.5	more on the side of scriptural literalism or whether they're more willing to take a metaphorical
0:59.3	approach. Generally in academic theology, the doctrine of creation is understood to be more about
1:04.3	a relation of absolute dependence between creation or the universe or the world and God who created it and sustains it. So if you take
1:14.2	that view of the doctrine of creation, then whether or not the Big Bang was the beginning of
1:18.3	everything in existence and beginning of the universe in time doesn't matter so much. So this is
1:24.0	something that St. Thomas Aquinas said, although he did believe that there was a beginning in time, he said it's perfectly compatible with the doctrine of creation that the universe has always existed. But we do see in the history of the development of the Big Bang theory, theological and biblical questions come to the fore because suddenly people were wrestling with the scientific possibility that what it seems like
1:45.0	is being described in the Bible, let there be light, is something that can be substantiated by science.
1:50.1	And that was something that, yeah, Pope Pius was quite keen to argue for.
1:54.6	Yeah, well, indeed it was a Catholic priest who first sort of came up with the Big Bang, discovered
1:59.6	the Big Bang. I don't quite know how to cash out that particular.
2:02.3	Yeah.
2:02.6	Yeah, George Lemaitra.
	...

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