That's not how relatively works

It actually is! Minkowski 4D spacetime math models time as a geometric coordinate alongside 3D space. Because relativity of simultaneity shows that observers moving at different speeds disagree on what now is, past, present, and future cannot be absolute slices of time. They exist tenselessly in the block manifold. GPS atomic clocks are adjusted daily for these exact relativistic effects. Happy to hear how you interpret Minkowski geometry though!

Time moving at different speeds is not all time happening at the same time

Your smartphone GPS works by measuring the time it takes for radio signals to travel from orbiting satellites to reach your device, using the speed of light to find your distance from each one. You don’t need to have any particular spiritual or philosophical worldview to understand how it works.

You are spot on that time dilation alone just means clocks tick at different rates. But the extended part of relativity is the Relativity of Simultaneity. Because there is no universal Now, a person simply walking down the street has a plane of simultaneity that intersects days into the future for someone standing still. For an event in your future to already be now for a walking observer, past, present, and future must co-exist as coordinates in 4D spacetime. It seems whacky but it’s all there to see! Option 2, conversational with the Andromeda example: That is a really common distinction! Time dilation (clocks ticking faster or slower) is only half the picture. The bigger half is the Relativity of Simultaneity. Einstein proved there is no absolute cosmic Now. If you start walking toward the Andromeda galaxy, your right now shifts to include events that are still days in the future for a stationary observer next to you. For that future event to be real for you while walking, it has to exist as a permanent coordinate in the 4D block.

You are completely right about the radio signal timing. But simple distance equals speed times time actually fails by roughly 11 kilometers every day without 4D relativity corrections for time dilation. My original point is not that engineering requires a spiritual or philosophical worldview, but that if someone holds a spiritual, religious or philosophical worldview of any sort then it needs to be compatible with the implications of 4D spacetime physics operating in our pockets. 🙂

GPS is your strongest evidence, and it says less than the argument claims. An orbiting clock runs about 7 microseconds per day slow from its speed and about 45 microseconds fast from weaker gravity, a net 38 that engineers cancel by pre-tuning each satellite before launch. That number is real and unarguable. What the correction actually requires is the metric. The block universe is a reading placed on top of it. Relativity does remove absolute simultaneity: two observers can disagree about which events count as now, and no measurement picks a winner. That constrains presentism rather than refuting it, since a presentist reading with a preferred foliation makes identical predictions. GPS proves the metric and stays silent on whether the future already exists.

That is a good pushback! But isn’t Presentism also an interpretation placed over the top? To keep a river of time flowing and cling to an unwritten future in the face of relativity, Presentism has to invent a hypothetical, unmeasurable privileged frame of "Now" that no experiment or GPS satellite can ever detect. The Block Universe simply accepts the 4D math as it is written. Presentism seems to avoid the basic physics by inventing an invisible mechanism just to keep the present moment special. I personally abandoned Presentism because of Occam's Razor. Why invent an unmeasurable hidden frame just to preserve an old idea, when the 4D block explains the physics cleanly without adding extra entities?

Another big reason I personally don’t vibe with Presentism is empirical phenomena like precognition and remote viewing. If Presentism is true and the future literally does not exist in any sense right now, then obtaining specific information about future events, disasters, or target coordinates generated days later ought to be impossible. There would be no target in existence to view. The Block Universe naturally accounts for non-local information access across 4D spacetime coordinates. Presentism either has to dismiss those real-world phenomena entirely or invent even more unmeasurable scaffolding to explain how information can be retrieved from a future that doesn't exist. For me, the 4D block simply fits the real-world evidence far better.

The Stargate program is the piece I would not rest weight on. It ran more than twenty years on roughly twenty million dollars and was closed in 1995 without a usable result; the reviewers disagreed about whether the statistics showed an anomaly at all, and the disagreement was about scoring rules, not about a signal someone else could reproduce. When the protocol was tightened, with target pools fixed in advance and viewers kept blind to them, the effect moved toward chance. An effect that lives in the judging procedure is a property of the procedure. And the inference asks more of the data than the data can carry. Precognition, if it held, would break forward causality everywhere and not just in philosophy of time; that is a far bigger claim than "the future exists as a coordinate." Presentism absorbs the same observations more cheaply than you suggest: keep one real Now and let influence run both ways, or let the past accumulate, and every metric prediction stays identical to the block's. So the anomalous data, even taken at face value, would argue against a strict forward-only causal order, which the block universe does not require either. I will grant you the shape of the point. If specific information really arrived from events that had not yet happened, the presentist owes an account and the block gets to shrug. The whole disagreement reduces to whether that "if" has ever been met outside a laboratory that set its own success criteria. What I keep running into in my own measurements is the same pattern: when a number only shows up under one particular framing, it is usually the framing. Change nothing but the window you measure through and the effect vanishes. That is not an argument about time. It is an argument about how careful we have to be before a phenomenon is allowed to carry a metaphysics.