[spekcular]

You may be interested to know that this exact objection has been made in the philosophical literature. See "Causal Fundamentalism in Physics" by Zinkernagel (2010). Available here: https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/4690/1/CausalFundam.pdf

At the end, the author notes (as you do) that if you consider a finite difference equation with small time steps, there are no pathological solutions. He also mentions that Newton takes this difference equation approach when solving problems in his Principia.

See also "The Norton Dome and the Nineteenth Century Foundations of Determinism" by van Strien:

>> Abstract. The recent discovery of an indeterministic system in classical mechanics, the Norton dome, has shown that answering the question whether classical mechanics is deterministic can be a complicated matter. In this paper I show that indeterministic systems similar to the Norton dome were already known in the nineteenth century: I discuss four nineteenth century authors who wrote about such systems, namely Poisson, Duhamel, Boussinesq and Bertrand. However, I argue that their discussion of such systems was very different from the contemporary discussion about the Norton dome, because physicists in the nineteenth century conceived of determinism in essentially different ways: whereas in the contemporary literature on determinism in classical physics, determinism is usually taken to be a property of the equations of physics, in the nineteenth century determinism was primarily taken to be a presupposition of theories in physics, and as such it was not necessarily affected by the possible existence of systems such as the Norton dome.

[ajkjk]

Somewhat interested, but tbh, the reason I thought of it is the same reason that they thought of it -- that it's obvious to anyone who studies physics from a philosophical angle that it really has to be that way. They just put it in a lot of fancy words so that it has academic rigor.