Be Careful What You Wish For: A Reply to Craig

Recently William Lane Craig (2000, 2001) has attempted to resuscitate an argument, originally given by George Schlesinger (1980), against the tenseless or B-theory of time, according to which the only intrinsically temporal entities are the temporal relations of earlier ⁄ later than and simultaneity. According to Craig, the objective reality of temporal becoming—the passage of time or events in time, from the future to the present and into the past—is implied by ‘‘the experience of wishing it were now some other time; for example, ‘[Wishing that] it were now 1968!’’’ (2001, p. 160). For, following Schlesinger, Craig maintains when I wish that it were now some other time, what I am wishing for or what my wish is about is that the temporal particular, the NOW, or the temporal property of presentness, or some other metaphysical substitute for the property of presentness, be at some moment in the temporal series other than the moment at which it is now located. Since, however, on the B-theory there is no moving NOW and there are no suitable tenseless surrogates with the same meaning as the wish, Craig concludes that B-theorists must maintain that anyone who has such a wish (including B-theorists themselves since such a wish is commonplace) is to that extent irrational. Since Craig believes that the wish is rational and that the rationality of the wish can only be explained by appealing to the objectivity of tense and temporal becoming he infers that the experience in question is a strong argument for the A-theory and against the B-theory. But is the wish rational? And can it be explained only if an A-theoretic ontology is true? The aim of my paper is to explore those questions and in so doing provide a B-theoretic response to Craig’s argument. Craig’s use of the terms ‘‘rational’’ and ‘‘irrational’’ is ambiguous, so I shall begin by delineating two possible interpretations of the