I think the term you're looking for is "scientism". In so far as "evolutionism" means anything, it means "believing in something like Darwinian evolution", which (1) is more specific than what I think you're going for and (2) is not the kind of meta-level position you're talking about.

(I also think that most complaints of this science-is-just-another-religion kind are rubbish, but that's a more controversial matter and I will not further derail this thread onto it.)

No, “evolutionism” is actually the most correct characterization. The quip about scientology was meant to caricaturise the belief more than anything. Your claims 1 and 2 are both incorrect.

Creationists and Evolutionists can both agree that scientific process creates good results and is a generally well-reasoned approach to learning about the current state of the universe and making predictions for the future. Where they disagree is the extent to which this is true, especially as it relates to the ability of those predictions to track reality going forward and backward in time, but that’s more covered in a sibling comment.

What creationists and evolutionists (as such) disagree about is not some broad question about the philosophy of knowledge, though doubtless most creationists and most evolutionists disagree about those too. What they disagree about is the specific question of how human life on earth came to be the way it is.

"Evolutionism" doesn't mean "believing that science is always right" or "believing that science is capable of answering questions about things other than repeatable experiments" or anything of the sort. Nor does it mean, as you put it elsewhere in this thread, "an axiomatic belief in the time invariance of physical laws". (Believing in those things might make someone more likely to be an evolutionist[1], but if that's enough reason for you to call them "evolutionism" then you'd better also be prepared to call being white "wealth" and being tall "playing basketball" and so forth.)

[1] But one doesn't have to believe those things in order to be an evolutionist, and I fear you're engaging in the widespread but unjustifiable practice of seeing that someone disagrees with you, thinking "what cognitive flaw might lead them to be wrong in that way?", picking an answer, and assuming it's right.

"Evolutionism" means "believing in evolution" or sometimes "believing that evolution is responsible for such-and-such particular things". (And sometimes some other related things, like "believing that evolution isn't just a consequence of physical laws but that Progress is somehow built into the fabric of the universe" or "applying the ideas of evolution to particular fields", but those aren't the meaning we're discussing here.)

(This isn't some idiosyncratic usage of the word "evolutionism"; every dictionary I've looked in agrees that this is how it's used.)

I don’t consider a belief in evolutionism a flaw any more than I consider belief in creationism a flaw. All I have said is that evolutionists match the GP’s description of being unwilling to consider what assumptions they are making, “hitting the wall”, so to speak. (as this thread has demonstrated, as I knew it would)

Upon reflection, it’s interesting that you leapt to describing my “flaw” as a burning desire to identify a “flaw”, when of course I did no such thing. But you did. That’s a common trope amongst evolutionists: “when I make unfounded assumptions based on my belief about X, it’s correct; when you do, it’s a flaw”. Of course you think it’s correct – it was your assumption in the first place! Enlightenment comes when you can count your assumptions.

Yeah, sure, you don't regard "evolutionism" as a flaw, dear me no, that's why you said it ought to be called scientology "to caricaturise the belief", because that's what people always do with things they don't regard as flaws. And, sure, claiming that a group of people assume axiomatically that something's true that you think is false, that definitely isn't imputing any sort of flaw to them. Riiiight.

In any case, I specifically didn't say that you regard evolutionism as a flaw. What I actually said differs from that in two ways.

1. I said I was making a conjecture about what you might be doing rather than a claim about what you are doing. "I fear you're engaging in ..." were my actual words.

2. The "flaws" I'm suggesting you may think you've identified are not evolutionism itself (at least, not as pretty much everyone uses the word) but other ideas: believing that science is always right, "axiomatic belief in the time invariance of physical laws", etc.

I am not, in fact, of the opinion that everything different from me is worse. (I do think it's curious that you're simultaneously (1) complaining at how I'm jumping to unjustified conclusions about your opinions and (2) jumping to unjustified conclusions about my opinions. But I suppose from your perspective it looks like I'm doing the same, so whatever.)

There's a difference (at least for me) between "the scientific process generally produces correct results" (which I would vigorously affirm, though if I were going to be facing some sort of cross-examination I would want to be more nuanced about it) and "science is always right" (which I would vigorously deny). Science produces (merely) hopefully-increasingly-accurate approximations to truth; even excellent theories (e.g., Newton's theory of gravitation) often turn out to be wrong or incomplete or applicable only in restricted domains; sometimes the scientific consensus is just flatly wrong about something for a while.

What distinguishes science from every other popular way of trying to arrive at the truth is that it has pretty effective ways of eventually finding out when something's wrong, and pretty effective ways of finding good theories even when that's difficult, with the result that it makes progress in ways that other ways of trying to get at the truth are much worse at.

I'm not sure whether what you say has no non-circular evidence is "evolutionism" or "the idea that evolutionism itself is somehow scientific", nor what idiosyncratic meaning you're giving to "evolutionism" in this particular instance. So I can't really comment on your claims about that.

But, if what you're saying is what might be more conventionally expressed as "there is no non-circular evidence for uniformitarianism" ... well, actually I think I still can't really comment because it's still too vague. I think the right way of looking at this is that uniformitarian theories are simpler and we should prefer simpler theories, that we have uniformitarian theories that seem to do a good job of describing (present evidence concerning) the past and the future, that these theories have done better at predicting subsequent observations than their "creationist" counterparts, that you can jury-rig a non-uniformitarian theory to fit with whatever evidence you please but only at the cost of making it more complicated in a way that makes the overall probabilities at least as much lower as not jury-rigging it would have made them (cf. "the woman next door is a witch; she did it" which in some sense can "explain" any observations but all you're really doing is hiding improbability in parts of your theory that you aren't making explicit); etc. I haven't seen anything that really looks to me as if it's sufficiently better explained by a "deeply non-uniformitarian" theory to outweigh the extra complexity required by any such theory that "predicts" things better. You may of course evaluate things differently, but I'm pretty sure what's going on here is very much not that I am unable to conceive of the possibility that uniformitarianism is wrong.

Again, I said “X might be the observed outcome of someone were to believe Y”, and you’ve interpreted that as me leaping to the conclusion that you believe Y.

But your argument is still circular and faith based. There’s no concrete framework whereby your view is “simpler”, but if you already hold it you will perhaps feel that it is. I personally feel Genesis 1 is simpler than anything any scientist has come up with, and I choose to believe it is more correct as well. But I’m not so far down the rabbit hole to not see that other beliefs are equally well supported.

But that’s all missing the main point, which is that science has no way to determine origins, and there’s no way an experiment could get us closer to determining the past. The past is outside the domain of scientific knowledge, as it cannot be experimentally verified. Experimental verification being the cornerstone of science.

Consider I construct a beautiful statue in a room. You awake in the room and attempt to understand the origin of the statue. You observe it for aeons and collect many measurements about its state. You observe that over time, a layer of dust has settled on the statue, clinging to its entire surface evenly. Looking at all your scientific observations, you conclude that many millions of years ago, there was nothing. Then over time, layers and layers of dust settled. Over enough years, you posit, a statue must have formed. It seems surprising, sure. How could this chaotic dust make a beautiful statue? But the science is clear: nothing else has ever been observed that could cause that statue to exist, and winding back the clock millions of years from the observations you make would indeed produce nothing. Thus this is the simplest explanation, so no matter how unbelievable, it is what we must accept barring anything better. What’s that you say? An intelligent being might have designed the statue and put it there for you to observe? Preposterous: we have no evidence of such an intelligent designer. All we have is this beautiful statue.

Again, you are not fooling anyone when you insinuate things and then act offended when someone actually responds to the insinuations. [EDITED to fix a typo]

The past is not outside the domain of scientific knowledge. (Unless you refuse to call something "knowledge" unless it is known absolutely for certain, in which case the situation is much simpler: there is no such thing as knowledge, scientific or otherwise.)

The way science works is: you have a bunch of observations, you come up with theories that attempt to explain them, you try hard to refute those theories by thinking of tests/observations/... that will give different results depending on what theory (if any) is right, and you try hard to look for alternative theories to explain the observations, and the situation you hope for -- which happens very frequently -- is that you have one not-too-complicated theory whose predictions match the observations well, and that despite extensive efforts no one has found a theory that does as well without being much more complicated (e.g., by "baking in" the actual observed results), and then that theory is the one you provisionally treat as "true" until that situation stops obtaining (e.g. because someone found a better theory, or it fails to account for new observations).

(yesyesyes, this is a simplified account, but I claim it captures the essence of how science works)

You will notice that nothing in that paragraph forbids those theories to say things about the past.

Which is just as well, because the very most primitive scientific activity possible, namely making and reporting a single observation, is necessarily about the past. Suppose I measure the temperature of a liquid by immersing a digital temperature probe in it and looking at the output. It takes a bit of time for the sensor in the probe to equilibrate with the liquid around it. It takes a bit of time for the electronics in the probe to do their thing. It takes a bit of time for the light from the display to reach my eyes. It takes a bit of time for my brain to process that and turn it into an actual number. By the time I write "115.2 degrees C" in my notebook, the actual liquid-being-at-that-temperature is several seconds in the past.

But I'm still happy writing the number down, because by far the most likely explanation for my current state of "thinking I have just read the display as saying 115.2 degrees C" is that a few seconds ago the temperature of the liquid was about 115.2 degrees C.

Of course it's always possible that I've suffered some strange brain aberration, or that the probe is malfunctioning, or that an angel reached down and interfered with the experiment. Or that some currently-unknown physical phenomenon invalidates the way the temperature probe works, for this particular liquid in this particular situation. Everything in science is provisional. But the fact that something's in the past doesn't in itself make it more provisional. And, while those exotic alternative scenarios are possible, they aren't likely: strange brain aberrations are thankfully rare, lab equipment usually either works or fails in obvious ways, miracles are rare if they ever happen at all. So we generally do OK to ignore those scenarios until plenty of actual evidence for them turns up.

So, anyway, what of your example? In any actually plausible version of the scenario where one human being makes a statue that's later seen by another, that other human being is going to find plenty of evidence of other intelligent beings who might have made it. (E.g., to be excessively literal about how you set up the scenario, if I observe that statue then I am going to be aware of having seen many many other statues before all of which I have good reason to think were made by people.)

So if you want hypothetical-me not to think it plausible that the statue was made by an intelligent being, even though in fact you made it, you're going to have to go to great lengths to erase from the world -- or at least the portion of it that I get to see -- all evidence of other people who might have made the statue. And it's going to have to be a hypothetical-me that lacks all the real-world knowledge I have involving other people. And, well, if hypothetical-me is looking at a world from which all evidence of other intelligent beings, apart from that statue itself, has been carefully erased, then I am not sure it's much of a gotcha to say "aha, your so-called scientific approach will never discover the intelligent designer here!". If you falsify the evidence competently enough, you can indeed get someone to believe something false; how exactly is that supposed to indicate that they're doing it wrong?

It would seem we are in agreement. Your science cannot find the designer if the designer does not wish to be found by your science. That doesn’t mean we can say they do or do not exist. Thus: creationism and evolutionism, the two sides of the coin.

We can, if the evidence has the right shape, say: Either there is no god, or some omnipotent or near-omnipotent being is deliberately screwing with us to try to make us draw wrong conclusions.

The existence of that caveat is not peculiar to the question of the origins of the universe, or life, or humans; nor is it peculiar to questions involving gods.

You do a bunch of physics experiments and think hard and conclude: electric charge is made out of little bits and the size of each one is so-and-so-much. Strictly, you should add "or some omnipotent or near-omnipotent being is deliberately screwing with us".

You find your spouse in bed with someone else and conclude that they are unfaithful. Strictly, you should add "or some omnipotent or near-omnipotent being is deliberately screwing with us". Er, perhaps I should have chosen a term other than "screwing with", sorry.

Someone's accused of murder and they go to trial. The prosecution pulls out eyewitness reports of the murder, emails from the accused saying how they were planning to kill the victim, etc. The defence has nothing but handwaving. The jury finds them guilty. Strictly, they should add "or some omnipotent or near-omnipotent being is deliberately screwing with us".

You can add that caveat to everything: literally any conclusion we draw by any means could be invalidated if some omnipotent or near-omnipotent being is deliberately trying to get us to draw the wrong conclusions.

But we don't, in fact, bother adding that caveat all the time, because there would be no point, and because to most of us it doesn't in fact seem very plausible that an omnipotent or near-omnipotent being is deliberately screwing with us. (But of course maybe we just feel that way because said being is messing with our minds.)

And, of course, it's especially self-defeating to offer this sort of objection to science specifically when it conflicts with revealed religion. Because if you're taking the "God is deliberately trying to deceive us" hypothesis seriously, you'd better take it just as seriously when it's applied to your religion's scriptures, or its allegedly inspired prophets, or any personal revelations you may think you've had, or any of the other specifically religious sources that religious people get beliefs from.

(Does the evidence have the right shape? All the above is much less relevant if in fact the available evidence points in the direction of, say, a 6-day creation 6000-ish years ago. Or, more modestly, in the direction of there being a benevolent god who intervenes in the world from time to time. It looks to me as if the evidence fits much better with a no-god hypothesis than with any sort of theism I know about, other than versions of theism that deliberately make the same predictions about the world as atheism does. Obviously I might be misinterpreting the evidence, or seeing a misleading subset of it, or something; but note that those are entirely different arguments from the "well, you wouldn't be able to tell if God were deliberately trying to mislead you" argument you've settled on.)

Why are you assigning malice? Just because the omnipresent being designed things a particular way but wishes to be known on faith rather than an explicit name tag doesn’t mean he’s “screwing with us”, as you seem so want to repeat.

Frankly I don’t even know what point you’re trying to make. I was very clear in my goal for this thread, and it has very clearly been achieved to any onlooker. If you’re too deep in your argument to see it… yes, precisely.

I'm not "assigning malice". I'm just observing that the hypothesis you're pushing here is of an omnipotent being going out of its way to make us draw wrong conclusions. You can call that malice or benevolence or caprice or anything you like; I'm not particularly concerned with the motives of this hypothetical deceptive superbeing. But the hypothesis is of a deceptive superbeing, one that goes out of its way to have the universe not look as if there's a superbeing in charge of it.

(At least to whatever extent your statue example is meant to reflect the actual world. As I said: if in that example you want me not to conclude that the statue was likely made by an intelligent being even though in fact it was, you will need to go out of your way to hide from me all the evidence there would naturally be of intelligent potentially-statue-making beings like yourself.)

If you don't like the specific phrase "screwing with us" then by all means substitute something like "trying to make us draw wrong conclusions".

It seems to me that whether something is clear "to any onlooker" is a thing for the onlookers to decide.

The evidence is clear to anyone with eyes: the intricately designed statue. It should be obvious to anyone that it was created, as it was for millennia across the entire world. It’s only after centuries of forced re-education that people began to think the dust randomly settled in the shape of a beautiful statue.

I'm not sure whether your statue is meant as an analogy for the universe as a whole, or life on earth, or what. But whatever specific thing you have in mind, it's obviously false that "only after centuries of forced re-education" that people began to think ... well, anything, actually. Because then what motivated the "forced re-education" in the first place?

What's "evolutionism"?

A strawman made up by religious fundamentalists so that they can feel superior to others.

No… it’s simply the worldview opposite creationism. Any assertions of feelings of superiority are very certainly projections. It’s interesting that my entire argument in this thread has been equivalence, but people want to interpret it as some sort of superiority thing.

Following imperical studies is not a world view though, you’re making that part up which is why I dismissed it as a strawman.

To the extent there are empirical studies demonstrating evolution, I and many creationists besides me believe them too.

Where the faith of evolutionists lies is in taking those studies showing the most minuscule changes then saying “look, small changes have occurred by random mutation. we know of no other mechanism by which anything might occur, therefore this is how everything was created! what, you don’t trust the science?? heresy!”

The worldview characterized by an axiomatic belief in the time invariance of physical laws. It is contrasted by creationism, which posits non-differentiable physical behaviors.

There’s a middle ground of accepting the possibility of differentiable but non-constant mechanisms that should technically be owned by the evolutionists, but this is a rarely embraced territory: you get neither the warm fuzzies of belief in a God who specially designed you, nor the cool satisfaction of a belief in making observations about the universe now and scaling/time-inverting them to speak confidently about the distant past and future.

People sometimes complain about "motte-and-bailey" rhetoric, where what you argue for explicitly is much more unassuming than what you really believe. I have rarely seen so spectacular an example.

Motte: "there might be non-differentiable phenomena in physics". (Note that e.g. anyone who believes that "wavefunction collapse" in quantum physics is an actual real thing believes in non-differentiable phenomena; so does anyone who thinks that inside black holes there are actual singularities rather than merely places where general relativity breaks down and something more complicated happens; so does anyone who thinks that the smooth-looking stuff we seem to observe arises from some combinatorial underlying structure like a cellular automaton or some kind of constantly-evolving network of vertices and edges and whatnot.)

Bailey: literal freakin' creationism.

(Complete with "a God who specially designed you". Something in the world might not be differentiable, therefore there is a God who specially designed you. Gosh!)

As I said elsewhere in this thread: evolutionism means belief in evolution, or belief that evolution happened some particular way or did some particular set of things. And creationism means belief in creation, or belief that creation happened some particular way or did some particular set of things. These are not, even slightly, the same thing as whether or not some functions describing the universe might be non-differentiable.

Also, "non-differentiable" is not, even slightly, the same as "not time invariant". E.g., the function y = cos(exp(-x)) + exp(-x) cos(x^2) is not-time-invariant on both large and small scales, but it's differentiable, analytic even. And "x is a continuous function of t, and (dx/dt)^2 = 1 at all but a discrete set of points" is as time-invariant a law as you might care to mention, but almost all its solutions have places where they aren't differentiable."

You clearly missed the paragraph where I very explicitly talked about the time variant differentiable middle ground? That’s surprising, it’s the majority of the content.

Regardless, I’m not talking about functions describing the universal state, I’m talking one layer up from that, those that describe how that state changes, including any instantaneous events. Does the cat instantaneously die at any given second with the same probability, or does something intervene in the one second it does that did not exist in any of the others?

I didn't miss the paragraph, but it seemed (and still seems) fundamentally confused to me.

[EDITED to add:] I do agree that when I said "X and Y are clearly not the same thing" I should have added something along the lines of "I see that after treating them as the same thing you say that technically they're different but hardly anyone embraces just one of them, but I don't think the paragraph where you talk about that makes much sense". Sorry about that. In any case, it's rather a side issue; "nondifferentiable things obviously don't imply a god who specially designed you" was the more important point, and one your response doesn't address at all.

Why would there be a "time variant differentiable middle ground" but not a "time invariant nondifferentiable middle ground"?

Why would differentiability imply no God? (You think a god could intervene in the universe but not in a differentiable way??) For that matter, why would nondifferentiability imply a God? (Maybe nondifferentiable things happen that are just random noise.)

Why would having "time-variant" phenomena stop you using science to extrapolate to the past or future? A time-varying law can be expressed as a time-invariant law about time-varying functions. So I suppose when you say "time-variant" you mean something like "varying with time in a way that cannot be described scientifically. But the real-work here is in the "cannot be described scientifically" bit, not the "varying with time" bit. If you had time-invariant behaviour that was beyond scientific description, that would block grandiose scientific ambitions too.

I think that when you say "non-differentiability" you mean "divine intervention", and when you say "time-variant" you mean "fundamentally inaccessible to science", but you know that if you say what you actually mean then people will be all "science demonstrably works really well" and "claims of divine intervention keep not checking out when investigated carefully" and "evidence for gods is really weak" and so on, so you've picked these more modest-sounding mathematics-looking terms to use instead.

Top tip: if you're going to do that, it gives the game away a bit if in the very next paragraph you start saying ridiculous things like "if you take things to be differentiable then you don't get the warm fuzzies of a God who specially designed you", and people will notice.

Er, no. People who do know what they are talking about will notice that you are trying to pretend that a simple and relatively modest mathematical/physical thing (the world might behave in nondifferentiable, time-varying ways) is equivalent to, or straightforwardly entails, an absurdly different thing (the existence of a god who designed us).

(And also that you're trying the "blind them with science" manoeuvre on an audience full of people who actually know some science. And also that you're using words in ways that have nothing to do with how everyone else uses them.

Go on then, explain this nondifferentiable constant case I was missing.

I'm not sure why you're focusing on that which was a minor aside amidst a bunch of more substantial things that you've ignored. OK, I guess I know why you're focusing on it. Anyway:

Your account of things has "evolutionism" meaning (axiomatic) disbelief in (1) time-varying physical laws and (2) nondifferentiable natural phenomena. (I'll repeat that this is not in fact what "evolutionism" means, but we'll bracket that for now.)

You have, of course, not been precise about what you mean by those terms; if it turns out that what follows makes some wrong guess then I invite you to be more precise about your meaning rather than merely complaining that I guessed wrong about things you didn't deign to make explicit. But:

Consider the notion of "wavefunction collapse" in quantum physics. This may or may not be a real thing that happens (e.g., in the Everett "many worlds" interpretation it isn't), but many physicists have treated it as a real thing and there's no particular inconsistency in doing so. This is a nondifferentiable phenomenon. Discontinuous, even. The state of the world changes abruptly from one thing to another substantially different thing.

Do you need to believe in time-varying laws, in your sense (according to which such belief can rightly be termed "creationism"), in order to accept a version of quantum physics with instantaneous wavefunction collapse? It sure doesn't look like it to me.

More broadly: "nondifferentiable" and "time-varying" are just completely separate things; so far as I can tell, there is nothing that would make one of them enforce or prevent the other. Again, maybe you're using those terms in idiosyncratic senses that have little to do with what I think they mean; in that case, maybe it turns out that there is no "nondifferentiable constant case"; but in that case, you owe us an explanation of the meanings you're giving those terms.

I guess I need to address one specific thing you might be trying to do. (I hope you aren't, because it would be nonsense.) It is, of course, true that no mathematical function can be both (1) constant and (2) nondifferentiable. But that has nothing to do with the question here, despite your use of the phrase "nondifferentiable constant case"; you have made it clear elsewhere in the discussion that when you say things like "time-varying" or "constant" you are talking about the laws, not the specific functions they describe. (And of course literally no one believes that the functions by which we describe the physical world are all constant functions.)

That is the belief that leads to evolutionism, not the exact definition of evolutionism. A necessary precondition.

I don’t have time to explain basic mathematics. Suffice to say, the concepts of changing over time and differentiating are very related. If you didn’t know that… that explains a lot I suppose.

I still don’t know what your point is, by the way. Maybe we should settle that.

I have a PhD in pure mathematics from one of the world's great universities. If your best explanation for what's going on here is that I don't understand basic mathematics, then you need to think again.

(My current best-guess explanation for this conversation is that you don't understand basic mathematics and are just slinging words around in ways you hope will sound impressive. Maybe that's wrong and there's some actual mathematical/physical insight that you haven't successfully communicated to me, but if so then you ought to show us the details rather than simply waving your hands and trying to sound superior.)

I've made several points, almost all of which you have ignored in favour of (usually incorrect) nitpicking on side-issues. The other place where you complained of not knowing what my point was was a different bit of the discussion where we were talking about different things. I'm not going to try to re-explain every point I've attempted to make in this discussion, but very briefly:

In the other subthread, my point was that the only way for your statue-scenario to work (in the sense that an actual scientifically-minded person, as opposed to a stupid caricature-scientist out of the fantasies of creationists, would dismiss the possibility that some intelligent being created the statue) would be for someone or something with great power and cleverness to deliberately obfuscate all the evidence that there would be, in the ordinary actual world, that the statue was made by a person; and that if that's the sort of hypothesis you have to appeal to in order to claim that "creationism" and "evolutionism" are on some kind of equal footing, then you basically have to give up on the idea of ever having any real evidence for one thing over another.

(In the real world, of course that isn't the situation; what actually happened was that we looked at this thing-you're-analogizing-to-a-statue and sought to understand it more clearly, initially taking "intelligent design" as the default explanation, and the best explanations we could find surprisingly turned out not to involve any sort of designing intellect after all.)

In this one, my point is that (1) you originally tried to define evolutionism as "the worldview characterized by an axiomatic belief in the time invariance of physical laws" in contrast to "creationism, which posits non-differentiable physical behaviors", and (2) that is not in fact remotely what either of those words means, and (3) none of your mathematics-looking talk about this actually seems to make much mathematical sense. Specifically, (a) neither of those mathematical things either implies or is implied by the existence or nonexistence of God, or by the universe being or not being the creation of a God, or by God (if God there be) ever intervening in the universe; (b) the mathematical things you associate with "creationism" and "evolutionism" are pretty much completely independent of one another, as opposed to being some sort of opposites; (c) while you grudgingly admit the theoretical possibility of one of the other two possible combinations of them, the fourth is also possible so far as I can tell; (d) all of this looks to me as if you are slinging around words you do not understand deeply and hoping to make it sound as if there is something deeper to whatever variety of creationism you endorse than there actually is.

> You basically have to give up on the idea of ever having any real evidence for one thing over another

Exactly. We agree.

> best explanations we could find

We have no tested explanation of abiogenesis, chiefly. Among many other questions. Lots of theories that say “and throw your hands up and wave them around and wait 8 million years and tada, probably, idk”

God intervening in the universe is a potential source of sudden changes in the laws of physics. For instance changes that allow a man to walk on water or split a sea. Those changes are stepwise, they do not impact space time gradually. Thus non-differentiable. If the change was gradual, evolutionists would come up with a formula for it and say it magically is that way, for “reasons”. They might look at how their laws of gravity work and see that they aren’t right for galaxies, and say the reasons are “dark matter”, for example. I might say they’re God working exerting a differentiable influence, but those two are interchangeable, at least on the surface. It’s only the stepwise that is Godly.

Perhaps we agree that your position implies that we never have any real evidence for one thing over another. We do not agree that in fact we never have any real evidence for one thing over another, and I don't believe you actually live as if you never have any real evidence for one thing over another.

In any case, if your position leads you to this sort of cognitive nihilism, so much the worse for it.

We have plenty of plausible explanations for abiogenesis. We don't know whether any particular one of them is right -- good evidence about what happened billions of years ago can be scarce. (Not because of any general impossibility in getting evidence about the past. Sometimes it's there, sometimes not.) And we for sure don't know all the details. Maybe we never will.

That isn't any sort of advantage for creationism as a theory of the origins of life, because we also don't have any details of how God allegedly created life. "God said 'let there be X' and there was X" is no more detailed an explanation than even the handwaviest naturalistic theories of abiogenesis.

(We should ask: how detailed an explanation should we expect to be able to figure out, if either sort of theory is right? And I think the right answer is "probably not very detailed in either case, though the prospects are maybe better for the naturalistic theories".)

I understand that you're saying that divine intervention could produce non-differentiable changes. But I think you're completely wrong about the logical relationships between different kinds of change and possible divine intervention. (1) I'm pretty sure that as far as human observation can distinguish, anything that can be done by a non-differentiable divine intervention can also be done by a differentiable one. (If you restrict God to real-analytic interventions, that might be a different matter.) (2) I can't see any reason why non-differentiable changes should require any sort of god; I already gave several examples of (conjectural but) perfectly respectable naturalistic physics involving non-differentiable changes.

When you're faced with something that doesn't fit well with existing physical theories, you can postulate divine intervention, or postulate that some amended naturalistic theory might fix it up, and that's true whether or not something nondifferentiable seems to be involved. (Especially as, lacking the ability to look infinitely closely at things, we can never tell for sure whether something nondifferentiable is going on. E.g., one of my examples of possible nondifferentiable change in naturalistic physics was "wavefunction collapse", but you could have objective wavefunction collapsing that happens smoothly but very very quickly and no observation we're currently able to make could tell the difference.)

Historically, the track record of the "look for amended naturalistic theories" approach is pretty good; it seems like it leads to genuinely new and improved understanding more than the "give up on naturalistic explanations and say a god did it" approach does. And there's an obvious reason why: if you just say "God did it" then that doesn't make any progress in understanding, whereas if you make yourself look for better naturalistic theories that actually work then you're forced to come up with theories that do a better explanatory job. In principle, of course, it might happen that every time you postulate "God did it" you get new insights into the purposes and preferences of God, and that might e.g. help you make predictions just as well as new scientific theories do. In practice, that doesn't actually seem to happen. (One might ask why that is, and of course the atheist has an obvious answer to that question.)

So, e.g., let's take your example of gravity and the rotation of galaxies. We don't yet know what's going on. We have a rather vague candidate naturalistic explanation: there's a load of stuff in the universe that has mass but doesn't otherwise interact much with the things we can detect. That isn't a very satisfactory explanation because it's so unspecific (though e.g. it does let us make sense of some puzzling things besides the rotation of galaxies, such as the so-called "Bullet Cluster"). You suggest that maybe it's "God working exerting a differentiable influence". Could be.

So, what might be our state of understanding 50-100 years down the line? We might be just as confused as we are now. But it seems at least plausible that we might by then have a better naturalistic theory (more details, more concrete predictions, more things we can check), which may or may not still involve "dark matter". Do you think it's plausible that we will have a better divine-intervention theory? One where we can say "we now understand that the rotation of galaxies is the way it is, because God is doing X, which he wants because of Y"? So far as I know, the number of cases where this sort of intellectual progress has come out of saying "God did it" is zero.

That doesn't necessarily mean "God did it" is false. Maybe we're unlucky (at least in so far as we were hoping to understand the universe) and a lot of things are the result of divine activity that's simply beyond human comprehension. But every time we see something puzzling, go looking for naturalistic explanations, and find them, that becomes less plausible.

> The worldview characterized by an axiomatic belief in the time invariance of physical laws. It is contrasted by creationism, which posits non-differentiable physical behaviors.

LOL. You’re just cargo culting philosophy now, with a thin veneer of sciencey-sounding jargon.

1) An axiom is not an article of faith, it’s something on which we build a theory. Euclid’s axioms are invalid in quite a few situations and nobody loses any sleep about it.

2) The opposite of “the laws of physics never change” is “the laws of Physics can change”, not “god did it”. People would be very interested if you proved that Physics is not invariant with respect to time, because it would mean that energy is not conserved and it would open massive possibilities from a theoretical point of view. That would be much more impactful than most Nobel prizes in the last 60-odd years.

3) There is plenty of “non-differentiable physical behaviour” with invariant laws of Physics. No need for any creator.

> There’s a middle ground of accepting the possibility of differentiable but non-constant mechanisms that should technically be owned by the evolutionists

You fail to even allude to what this middle ground would be. Science itself would be fine with the time invariant being violated. A lot of laws we now know would be wrong, but science itself would not have any more problem than when we realised that the Galilean transformation of velocities was not actually true.

Also, “differentiable but non-constant mechanisms” is just meaningless babble.

> but this is a rarely embraced territory

For a simple reason: it is a straw man and nobody actually believes what you are attacking (mostly because it is meaningless).

> you get neither the warm fuzzies of belief in a God who specially designed you, nor the cool satisfaction of a belief in making observations about the universe now and scaling/time-inverting them to speak confidently about the distant past and future.

You seem to be assuming that everyone shares your philosophical system, just swapping “science” for “god”. It is not the case. We do not need warm fuzzies or cool satisfaction. And we do not get any particular pleasure from the fact that any god that is not simply a hands-off creator is exceedingly implausible.

You believe in whatever you tant to, and it’s fine. Do not assume that we are like you are.

> Science itself would be fine with...

When you say "science", do you include scientists?

If not, how does "science" accomplish anything?

And if so, history is filled with numerous instances of scientists "not being fine with" (to put it nicely) ideas that conflict with their beliefs (which are often perceived as, and asserted as, facts).

> We do not need warm fuzzies or cool satisfaction. And we do not get any particular pleasure from the fact that any god that is not simply a hands-off creator is exceedingly implausible.

In science, are things like omniscience &/or mind reading possible? Because I encounter "scientific thinkers" (daily) and actual practicing scientists (frequently) who make explicit, unironic assertions like this about what their brethren do, and believe, and how they think (perfectly), and numerous other literally unknowable things (the future, for one example, counterfactual reality, for another).

I wonder: could it be possible that subscribing to (or being subscribed to) a relatively high quality (yet flawed) metaphysical system doesn't render one perfectly rational?

I also wonder: could something more powerful than science displace it as King of The Throne, considering the psychological grip it has on people (including government, academia, and the media, three of the most powerful reality synchronizers)? Could something do to science, what science did to religion? And if so: what might that be?

1. I mean axioms we take as fact when establishing a world view.

2. It can’t be proven that they are time invariant, that’s what you take on belief.

3. That’s not what I’m referring to. I’m referring to the laws themselves suddenly changing, not the state of a given particle suddenly changing.

If you don’t understand point 3 there’s not much more to say. If you did you’d understand a lot of the other things you don’t at the moment, for instance what it might mean for a function to be differentiable but not constant. Contrast G changing over spacetime as can be described by a differentiable function vs a constant vs stepwise at the will of the creator.

Sorry buddy, evolution is a fact.

Parts are, parts aren’t. If you aren’t able to specify exactly what you believe with regard to it, there’s not much more to say.

> Parts are, parts aren’t

>...specify exactly...

Go ahead then! You still haven't said anything of any substance.