Reddit reply in r/AcademicQuran: examples of puzzlement in secular quranic studies — November 5, 2025 · nnbvk02 | Ali Shukri Amin

>"You need to assume that the world you experience is real (as opposed to, say, a simulation). There's no way to prove it. This is the 8th question."

This is really hitting on the crux of the problem. If you assume that your experience of the world is accurate and reliable, there are only a few ways to go about doing this.

1. Assume that there is a benevolent God who is guaranteeing that there isn't, let's say, an evil demon manipuating your brain.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil_demon
This stance says our objective truths about the material world can be tethered to something outside of nature.

2. Assume that the material world is itself objectively real without further proof (materialism or naturalism). This stance takes the natural world as self-evident.

3. Take a noncommittal stance that says "I am not sure that I can trust my own experience of the world". This is skepticism or solipsism. This stance does not claim that evaluating the material world can ever lead to objective truth.

The materialist or naturalist position was not taken seriously in Europe until about 3 centuries ago because there was no good ontological explanation for why we should consider the material world self-evident until some important philosophy was done in that regard.

>"Would you mind explaining how this shows that historians presuppose naturalism, even when they are telling you that they will consider a supernatural explanation?"

Being willing to consider a supernatural explanation within a naturalist paradigm does not mean you are not a naturalist. The reason being is, HCM is a fundamentally secular method. A secular method predicated on empiricism and materialism. Since HCM states:

1. We CAN know objective truths
2. The mechanism we know objective truths by is physical evidence
3. We evaluate physical evidence by our senses
4. Our senses and logic are reliable
5. HCM does not make a positive statement on the existence of God (either a theological God or a philosophical one)

That means we are taking the: "Assume that the material world is itself objectively real without further proof (materialism or naturalism). This stance takes the natural world as self-evident."

Hence your statement,

>"You need to assume that the world you experience is real (as opposed to, say, a simulation). There's no way to prove it."

A skeptic would say, "my experience is insufficient objective evidence of the reality of the material world." So there is actually no "need to assume" that. You are making a choice to assume so, and the HCM is making that choice. Since the HCM makes that choice without a metaphysical anchor, that means it presupposes a naturalistic philosophy - even if it were to hypothetically onclude every instance of Quranic studies had a supernatural component (I would suggest that the fundamental assumption makes this impossible but offer this as an example).

>"since both the natural and supernatural are experiential (and is not related to what historians do, since historians are not averse to, say, attaining knowledge through logical reasoning instead of observation; even then, everybody *assumes* their experience is at least somewhat reliable, whether or not they believe in the supernatural)."

A sensory experience of the supernatural is possible within a naturalistic paradigm. That's not the point. The point is the initial assumption being made of whether or not the natural world is sufficiently self-evident for the purpose of knowledge gathering, and if so, then do we consider a non-material or supernatural world (the answer is no).

If the initial assumption is that the natural world is self-evident without recourse to metaphysics or skepticism, then neither of those lines of reasoning become neccesary, and we can proceed conducting all of our sciences without considering those questions using empirical methods only. Therefore it doesn't matter how much I later claim I can, on a case by case basis, consider supernatural miracles. I am free to do so, however I have already precluded both of those veins as legitimate areas of fundamental inquiry or sources of knowledge.

I personally feel that the idea that we should just trust that the material world is real for no other reason than our experience of it is a woefully insufficient basis to conduct any further thinking. It's essentially a faith statement. There are philosophers that have done a lot of work in ontology & epistemology to solve this problem. I don't find them convincing but at least that's robust.