These are good questions, and I look forward to seeing whether anyone has responses. Feser's book on philosophy of nature should, I suppose, address some of these matters in more detail, but it probably won't be out for at least a year.

What do presentists typically say about these matters? I suppose that most presentists will want a strategy for analyzing claims about the past, and perhaps there is a way to extend that approach to causal claims relating the past and the present.

Regarding final causes, though, it does not seem to me that the end of an acorn is a particular future state. For instance, we will want to say that an acorn has the same final cause in each of three possible worlds in which a) the acorn never grows into a tree, b) the acorn does grow into a tree, and c) the acorn does grow into a tree, but at a different time than in b).

Greg wrote:

What do presentists typically say about these matters? I suppose that most presentists will want a strategy for analyzing claims about the past, and perhaps there is a way to extend that approach to causal claims relating the past and the present.

I suppose that on an ontological level you would have to say that all statements about the past are *really* statements about something present. That's not utterly preposterous. 

You could say:

Statements about dinosaurs are *really* statements about present objects (fossils, etc) and their relation to a number of other knows present objects (the whole fossil record as well as biological and scientific facts as well as present- and atemporal -abstracta, etc).

Statements about history are statements about the historical record &etc.

Statements about recent history are really statements about memory as well as the recent record &etc.

I don't think this is going to be suitable to someone like Craig. It's going to lead to an ultimately non-realist view of the biblical record. You can still make his apologetics work in some sense, but he wouldn't be really entitled to say that 'Jesus Christ, the temporal being, died on the cross and rose from the dead in the past.' since there is no past. All the standard historical apologetics could ever say is that Christ's resurrection is as well or better attested in the historical record (not as a representation of or tool for the knowledge of an actual past) as anything.

You could take a certain kind of Platonic view of the above: You could say that the fossil record &etc aquaints us with the Form of dinosaur which is either a-temporal or ever-present, and all that's truthfully meant by "They existed in the past but not now." is "This form is actual but evinced in the natural world not by anything living." That won't save Jesus, however, I'm afraid, since 'the person of Jesus and the accidental details of his life' are not a Form. I don't know what you can save of history. Plutarch (probably the most fun Platonist to read) has some idea of history akin to this thought in his Parrallel Lives, wherein stories of great men are exemplifying types of man (which presumably is something Formal in some respect), but that idea makes the particulars of their life accidental and non-actual: every man could be a Ceasar-type and men other than Ceasar are.

If you wanted to save everything important about history, you would have to have some kind of extreme Platonism about the past wherin the whole of the past is actually eternally present as a form which we can become acquainted with through the record, but not only is this absurd (the past isn't present in that way, even if it's actual), but it's just eternalism with a special Platonic status for the past. Craig hints at the possibility of a Meinongianism about the past (which he tacitly rejects, see the link below), and I take that to be a rendition of the extreme platonism about the past that I just constructed.

----------------

The *best* I could do to save even X strikes Y causation was a kind of mechanist and determinist view. You would tell a story like this about my example: 

The movement of the eight is already immanent in the striking of the billiard by the cue. Our epistemic powers are insufficient to see this, but *if* you could be aware of all the relevant facts about the cue hitting the billiard, you would see that the eight is also struck *not in the future* but here and now.

You could also just say something like 'moments really aren't connected' but that loses causation. 

----------------

One possibility that would save the project is a kind of boethian-presentism- wherein there indeed is *only* the present but the present is God's view of all of time at once -but that looks like eternalism by another name or even the denial of the reality of time in any respect since the only true temporal predicate would be "now-for-god" which is simply a strange ensemble of everything that is which we would see as past present and future.

----------------

I tried to look to William Lane Craig on presentism as such to try to get a sympathetic defense. See:

http://www.reasonablefaith.org/can-we-refer-to-things-that-are-not-present

He notes that presentist Ned Markosian just bites the bullet on my first objection. Statements about things that don't exist aren't true. Craig sees the problem I note above: 'Oh no! I just lost the bible.'

His strategy is to deny what he and Richard Routley call the Ontological Assumption:

"OA. No genuine statement about what does not exist is true."

Okay, but then *what* are you talking about? 

This strategy is Craig's general strategy and Feser notes it in his follow up article. But how is it supposed to help? Of course I can talk about all sorts of things that don't exist. I can talk about Snow White, I can count all seven dwarves, etc. The question is how do I talk about the actual past as opposed to a fictional past. "Ontologically neutral" truth is not truth in the sense we're concerned about because we're concerned about the actual past, and presentism is the assertion that there is no actual past.