Reddit reply in r/AcademicQuran: examples of puzzlement in secular quranic studies — November 5, 2025 · nn6r4oa | Ali Shukri Amin

I believe you are conflating a presupposition and a supposition. While looking at any particular instance it's possible for a scholar of the HCM to consider any potential explanation, including a supernatural one, and then conclude that a naturalistic conclusion is most possible. They can do that without supposing, in that instance, that a naturalistic conclusion must be true.

But a materialistic or empirical approach to history is predicated on naturalism. This is pre-supposed. Before an analysis of any case is happening, there is a broader conviction that this science we are pursuing is based on evaluating available empirically data.

Nicolai Sinai,

"require the meanings ascribed to it to have been humanly 'thinkable' or 'sayable' within the text's original historical environment, as far as the latter can be retrospectively reconstructed. At least for the mainstream of historical-critical scholarship, the notion of possibility underlying the words 'thinkable' and 'sayable' is informed by the principle of historical analogy – the assumption that past periods of history were constrained by the same natural laws as the present age, that the moral and intellectual abilities of human agents in the past were not radically different from ours, and that the behaviour of past agents, like that of contemporary ones, is at least partly explicable by recourse to certain social and economic factors."

It's a bit of a red herring to say, "the HCM does not require naturalistic explanations, it's just that scholars have not yet come across any instance where a naturalistic explanation isn't the best one" because that very statement is presupposing naturalism. It's assuming that: we can trust our senses, we can trust empiricism, empiricism leads to truth, non-empirical sources of knowledge are not verifiable, and a whole host of other assumptions.

Without making these assumptions (pre-supposed), which do constitute a naturalistic approach, you never arrive at the HCM as a method in the first place to then have the privilege of discriminating on a case-by-case basis as to whether a supernatural explanation (supposing) can be entertained as opposed to a naturalistic one.

I am discussing something that is happening 3-4 layers higher on the epistemological chain than looking at some specific instance of a purported miracle and evaluating whether it's supernatural/natural.