The Ordinary View That Physics Complicates

Presentism is closer to what most religious and everyday thinking about time simply assumes without argument: prayer for the future, mourning for the past, and moral urgency about the present all make most straightforward sense if the future genuinely does not yet exist to be already decided and the past genuinely no longer exists to be revisited, which is part of why process theology, with its emphasis on a God who genuinely experiences the world's ongoing becoming moment by moment, sits closer to presentism in spirit than to a static eternalist block, even where it does not adopt the philosophical label explicitly.

Cyclical time traditions complicate the simple presentist picture in their own way, since a strictly cyclical cosmos, in which the same ages recur, sits awkwardly with presentism's assumption that once a moment has passed it is simply gone rather than due to recur again in substantially the same form. Physicists and philosophers of physics remain divided on whether relativity truly rules presentism out or merely complicates its formulation, which keeps this among the most actively unresolved disputes in the metaphysics of time, contested on scientific as much as philosophical grounds.