I am wading into a discussion I am neither equipped nor qualified to participate in, but as a thought experiment it piqued my curiosity so I will try my hand and let the experts run roughshod over my musings.
I first encountered the idea of Truthmakers via Ed Feser, here. Read this first. Today I saw an article by James Chastek at Just Thomism, here. That’s about all the preparation I have, besides the Metaphysics I’ve gleaned from the Orthosphere.
The question seems to be: How can past events be both true and not exist?
As mentioned I am unqualified for this so at this point I attempted to summarize the state of things but I can’t find the words. Read those two articles first and you’ll know everything I know about the issue.
Feser says Presentism holds that in our temporal realm, only present objects and events exist. Those who object to it suggest that past events and objects are true, so they must exist. Feser goes on to explain that they obviously do not exist in the same way that you or I exist, but they are true because they happened.
Chastek suggestions two additional solutions to the objection: If the contingency of events “prescinds from time” (or, if contingency of events is true, absent considerations of time) then there’s no special necessity for particular events at particular times. He says “There’s nothing in the concept of Lincoln requiring he be shot”.
The alternative is that contingency does not prescind from time, but if that’s the case then “past events as past cannot be otherwise”, which I take to mean that Object A is a current event and Object B is a past event, and a trait of Object B is that it is past and so cannot be conceived other than as a past event.
All of this is preamble. I ended up summarizing kind of.
Kristor has a metaphysical heuristic I like to use relating to “facts, acts, and truth“. In it, he describes present things as “occasions of becoming”, they are “in progress”. So this might actually conflict with what Feser said about only present things existing. The second an act is complete, it is in the past.
Let me approach this from a different angle.
Built into the present is the past. You cannot conceive of any present thing without some past thing. A wooden chair cannot exist if it was not assembled by a carpenter, or cut apart by a lumberer, or felled by a lumberjack, or exposed to sunlight, or planted as a seed, so on and so forth. The wooden chair does not exist apart from it’s past. It is the culmination of a sequence of completed acts going all the way back to the Prime Mover. The present is indistinct from the past, by definition.
Once an act is completed, it is unchangeable. I don’t know that I would say that makes it not contingent. It’s necessary as it pertains to the present, but not necessary insofar as God required it.
So then lets tackle the other part of the problem. Past events don’t exist. What does it mean to exist? It seems like presentism holds that existence is what Kristor would describe as “becoming”. Things that exist are becoming. The wooden chair is not a completed act, because a completed act implies necessarily that it is past. All completed acts lead to the current becoming of the chair.
The question about Truthmakers is “what makes this true”, which is another way of saying “is this a fact”. As Kristor explains, a Fact is a statement of truth. “The wooden chair exists” is true because exists implies it is actively becoming. “Abraham Lincoln Was Shot” is true because it is a completed act. “Abraham Lincoln Exists” is not true because Abraham Lincoln is not actively becoming. “Abraham Lincoln Existed” is true because Abraham Lincoln is no longer becoming.
This helps me wrap my head around the question, at any rate. I don’t think I’m putting forward any new arguments, but Kristor’s heuristic helps break it into useful chunks.
Times-Dispatch of Vichy Earth 