Relativity, the Passage of Time and the Cosmic Clock

Abstract

Who's Afraid of Special Relativity? Too many philosophers who shouldn't be. In particular presentists and Growing Block theorists tend to prefer alternatives. The presentist William Craig [Craig, W.L., 2001. Time and the Metaphysics of Relativity. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht], for instance, holds a neo-Lorentzian position, and the Growing Block theorist Michael Tooley [Tooley, M., 1997. Time Tense and Causation. Clarendon Press, Oxford] endorses Winnie’s theory. I, however, follow Richard Swinburne [Swinburne, R., 1983. Verificationism and theories of space-time. In: Swinburne, R. (Ed.), Space, Time, and Causality. D. Reidel, Dordrecht, pp. 63– 78] in holding that whatever objection could once have been based on Special Relativity has been undermined by the discovery of the almost isotropic expansion of the Universe, which provides us with the Cosmic Clock. Neither Presentism nor the Growing Block nor Storrs McCall's falling branches theory [McCall, S., 1994. A Model of the Universe. Oxford University Press, Oxford] are, I say, threatened by Special Relativity, but the Newtonian thesis of a uniform rate of the passage of Time has to be modified.