A Theologian Without God Walks Into a Physics Lab
Emily Qureshi-Hurst occupies a rare position in the science-and-religion discourse: she is a theologian and philosopher who does not believe in God. Her forthcoming book, Decoding the Cosmos, examines whether Christian theology coheres with modern physics, and this conversation with Alex O'Connor (CosmicSkeptic) ranges across creation, design, time, eschatology, and the resurrection. What emerges is not a triumphalist takedown of religion or a credulous defense of it, but a careful dissection of where the seams strain and where they hold.
The conversation is worth close attention not because it settles anything, but because it models a kind of intellectual seriousness that the science-religion debate desperately needs. Both participants resist the temptation to score cheap points, even when the material practically begs for it.
The Conflict Thesis Is Dead. Long Live Specific Conflicts.
Qureshi-Hurst is emphatic that the popular framing of science versus religion is reductive. She traces allegorical readings of Genesis back to the early church fathers and notes that biblical literalism is a relatively modern invention, emerging from the Reformation's project of stripping scriptural interpretation from ecclesiastical authority and returning it to ordinary believers. The historian Peter Harrison, she notes, argues that this literalist turn actually enabled science to flourish by freeing the natural world from allegorical overlay.
But she is equally insistent that specific scientific findings do conflict with specific religious doctrines:
I definitely don't want to say that scientific ideas and religious ideas don't come into conflict. They absolutely do.
This is a more honest and more useful position than either the "warfare thesis" popularized by Draper and White or the diplomatic dodge of non-overlapping magisteria. The question is never whether science and religion conflict in the abstract. It is always which findings create which problems for which doctrines.
The God-and-Time Problem
The most philosophically rich section of the conversation centers on God's relationship to time, which is Qureshi-Hurst's area of specialization. The core tension is straightforward: Christianity requires a God who acts in time (sending prophets, incarnating as Jesus, answering prayers), but the dominant theological tradition holds that God is atemporal, existing outside of time entirely.
Qureshi-Hurst lays out the options with admirable clarity. An atemporal God relates to the universe like an author holding a novel, seeing all moments simultaneously with no privileged "now." A temporal God exists within time, experiencing succession and change. The atemporal view pairs naturally with the B-theory (block universe), where past, present, and future all exist equally. The temporal view pairs with the A-theory (presentism), where only the present is real.
I think the B theory is best supported by science... 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 directly experience India right now, but it doesn't mean India doesn't exist.
The India analogy is elegant, though it may conceal more than it reveals. The inability to visit India is a practical limitation; the inability to visit the past appears to be a fundamental feature of physics. Whether the analogy holds depends entirely on whether one's metaphysics of time is right, which is precisely the question at issue.
Her treatment of William Lane Craig's neo-Lorentzian interpretation of special relativity is politely devastating. Craig, she explains, needs an A-theory of time for theological reasons and has constructed a neo-Lorentzian framework to accommodate relativity's challenge to absolute simultaneity. The problem is that this interpretation has gained essentially no traction outside philosophy of religion:
Unfortunately for Craig, the Neolorencian 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.
This is a pointed observation. When a metaphysical framework exists solely to serve a theological commitment and finds no independent support in physics, the most charitable reading is that it is ad hoc.
Fine-Tuning and the Paley Trap
On the fine-tuning argument, Qureshi-Hurst is less impressed than many philosophers. She considers it the most persuasive argument for theism she initially encountered, but ultimately classifies it as a sophisticated version of the same god-of-the-gaps reasoning that Paley deployed before Darwin:
I 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 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 religious argument in my view.
O'Connor pushes back, noting that there are non-gapy versions of the argument that attempt to reason by elimination rather than by ignorance. He also raises his friend Phil Halper's provocative suggestion that fine-tuning actually supports Gnostic Christianity better than orthodox Christianity: if the physical constants make life astronomically improbable, perhaps the good God did not want material life to emerge, but an evil demiurge found a way around the constraints.
This is a genuinely interesting counterpoint. The fine-tuning argument is usually presented as evidence for a benevolent designer, but the data are equally compatible with a hostile or indifferent one. The knife-edge improbability of life-permitting constants looks less like the work of a God who wanted life and more like the work of one who did everything possible to prevent it.
Heat Death and the Resurrection Problem
The conversation's most underappreciated section addresses Christian eschatology and the heat death of the universe. Christianity is committed to bodily resurrection and a renewed physical creation. But the heat death scenario, in which entropy reaches maximum and all structure dissolves into uniform thermal equilibrium, destroys the material substrate required for both.
Qureshi-Hurst frames this as a genuine theological problem that has faded from academic discourse and deserves revival. She argues it is more acute for presentists than for block-universe theorists:
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.
But O'Connor immediately identifies a deeper problem: even on block-universe assumptions, the atoms constituting a person's body change entirely over a lifetime. God could, in principle, reconstruct the ten-year-old version and the eighty-year-old version from different sets of atoms, producing two resurrected bodies from one person. This is a version of the classic ship-of-Theseus problem applied to eschatology, and neither participant has a ready answer.
The theological escape hatch, that God simply creates new matter for the resurrection, raises an even more fundamental question: if God can create new matter ex nihilo for the new creation, why create this universe at all? As Qureshi-Hurst acknowledges, this is a problem for Christianity with or without the heat death.
The Problem of Evil Remains King
When asked directly about her own non-belief, Qureshi-Hurst does not point to any of the arguments discussed in the conversation. Instead, she returns to the problem of evil:
Ultimately, it's not about arguments for me... the biggest one for me is the problem of evil. I can't see evidence of a good God in the world.
This is notable. A philosopher who has spent years studying the most sophisticated versions of theistic arguments and who can articulate them with genuine sympathy finds them intellectually interesting but existentially unpersuasive. The arguments about time, fine-tuning, and creation are puzzles she enjoys. The problem of evil is the one that actually moves her.
Bottom Line
This conversation is valuable precisely because neither participant is trying to win. Qureshi-Hurst brings genuine expertise in both theology and philosophy of physics, a combination rare enough that it produces insights unavailable from either discipline alone. Her work on God and time, in particular, demonstrates that the science-religion interface is far more philosophically interesting than the popular debate suggests. The strongest takeaway is methodological: start with the theological system as presented, then ask whether modern physics supports, contradicts, or is simply indifferent to it. That approach yields sharper questions than the usual practice of cherry-picking scientific findings to score points for or against theism.