Chapter 7 publishes the text of Pitcairneana, MS Eng 1114 in the Houghton Library, Harvard. In it, a spokesman for atheism, ‘Incredulous’, argues against ‘Credulous’, a spokesman for Christian orthodoxy, and makes various points, notably concerning the relationship between spiritual and non-spiritual bodies and the issue of motion being intrinsic to matter; he also argues in favour of the world’s being eternal rather than the result of a divine act of creation and offers a cyclical rather than progressive view of human development. The authors referred to in the dialogue include Samuel Clarke, Henry More, John Toland and Robert Hooke, while the treatise ends by invoking ‘axioms’ in an essentially Newtonian mode.

Quantum gravity is expected to require modifications of the notions of space and time. I discuss and clarify how this happens in loop quantum gravity.

It has long been thought that presentists face a difficulty squaring their ontological view with respectable truthmaker theory. Presentists either fall foul of the requirements of truthmaking or must commit to unfortunate ontological posits in order to satisfy them, thereby spoiling the supposed advantages of their view. Given the enormity of responses that have been generated to this objection, one could be forgiven for thinking that there must be some palatable response available to presentists. This book inclines toward the view that presentists, as compared to eternalists, have only inferior options available to them when it comes to the accounting of truths involving the past. The available replies to legitimate questions about truthmaking favor eternalism over presentism. What is offered in this chapter is a perspective on the presentism debate that applies a conception of truthmaking as ontological accounting. It poses a dilemma to presentism. Either the view fails to do justice to the task of ontological accountability, or – if it succeeds – it results in a view that is less ontologically satisfying than eternalism.