[explaininjs]

> people will notice

What does this mean? People who don’t know what they’re talking about will get their feathers all ruffled and start rambling about missing the case of nondifferentiable constants? I guess I should have expected as much. But that is, indeed, my point: evolutionists get stuck against the wall just the same as the rest of the religions the GP mentioned.

[gjm11]

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.

[explaininjs]

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

[gjm11]

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.)

[explaininjs]

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.

[gjm11]

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.

[explaininjs]

> 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.