Reddit reply in r/AcademicQuran: examples of puzzlement in secular quranic studies — November 6, 2025 · nngn6yd | Ali Shukri Amin

PART 2

"As indicated by the above characterization of the mid-twentieth-century American movement, naturalism can be separated into an ontological and a methodological component. The ontological component is concerned with the contents of reality, asserting that reality has no place for “supernatural” or other “spooky” kinds of entity. By contrast, the methodological component is concerned with ways of investigating reality, and claims some kind of general authority for the scientific method. Correspondingly, this entry will have two main sections, the first devoted to ontological naturalism, the second to methodological naturalism."

Naturalism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/naturalism/

>If your take is that it does not require methodological naturalism, I feel that you should express that more clearly when you typically argue that it requires naturalism (when you mean, specifically, philosophical naturalism, and you also think philosophical naturalists can accept supernatural conclusions).

I could have been more precise.

>Well, this is simply because, the vast majority of phenomena are natural phenomena. I say this as someone who believes in God and the supernatural.

This is a naturalist argument for which there is no objective proof. A skeptic would ask you to prove that natural phenomenon exist at all outside of your perception of them or your perception of causality (which you would be unable to do). Christian & Muslim atomists would argue that atoms do not have accidents without the True Doer and therefore there is no strictly autonomous "natural phenomenon".

Your position, as you have articulated it, is an assertion that is unproven, unless you want to argue from a place of phenomenology & ontology. It is also naturalistic, even if you believe in God & the supernatural.

>Earlier, you defined naturalism as saying that the material world is real. However, I do not even know if *this* is true. Who says that an Abrahamic theologian does not think you can come to objective truths from the natural world? They do not think you can obtain **ALL** objective truths from it, but that does not mean you cannot obtain **some** (like conclusions about the historicity of Constantine).

I never defined naturalism as the belief the material world is real. I defined it as the belief that the material world is real & self-evident in its realness & sufficient alone to derive objective truths.

Abrahamic theologians do believe you can come to objective truths using the natural world but they do not believe that the natural world alone can lead to objective Truth (i.e., in the absence of belief in God, we can be certain of anything). In the conceptualization of Abrahamic faith, if God does not exist, then we no longer are able to guarantee there is a benevolent surety to our senses, perception, or experience of the world - or even that the outside world is real.

>1. Many people believe the outside world is self-evident, but are agnostic about whether recourse is needed to an immaterial realm

These are materialists or naturalists.

>2. Many people do not think an appeal to the immaterial realm is needed, however, they are open to coming to that conclusion if the evidence is right; hence, what you call a *philosophical naturalist* is often someone who is so *provisionally* but is open to miraculous explanations in principle

This is a philosophical naturalist but not a methodological one.

Anyone who thinks that:

a) The outside material world is real

b) It is real in a self-evident fashion

c) I can come to know objective Truth from observation of the outside world

d) Other people's minds & subjective experiences are real (in that they exist truly)

e) My own experience of the world is mostly reliable

f) I do not need further evidence or proof for any of this

g) God or some transcendental immaterial anchor of Truth is not needed to prove this

Is a philosophical naturalist, even if they also believe they have seen a ghost or an angel or believe in God.

Abrahamic philosophers/theologians did not accept that the material world was self-evident without recourse to a benign God who had created the world, created humans, and given us a reliable means of interacting with reality. After the Arabic translations of Greek philosophy, neoplatonism was huge in Christian & Islamic thought (in which Plato's The Good essentially became God).

The reason why philosophical naturalism was never a popular approach historically is that it is extremely flimsy when attacked skeptically. This is why God was so important to philosophy. This changed with Hegelian ontology and the broader materialist philosophical wave in Europe (obviously you had philosophers like Nietzsche on the moral/ethical side and most people don't care about ontology, but the intelligentsia no longer saw a reason to do metaphysics, ontology, epistemology or appeal to the noumenon around this time).

An objection you may have is that most people don't consider these questions and so are de facto naturalists and that naturalism is the default outlook. I would argue that sociological research with respect to belief in God in children indicates that most children irrespective of background or origin grasp the idea of a supernatural Creator as a starting point and that naturalism is actually not the default assumption stack of most people. It IS something which we experience under the cultural and intellectual hegemony of secularism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_hegemony