Reddit reply in r/AcademicQuran: examples of puzzlement in secular quranic studies — November 6, 2025 · nngv63f | Ali Shukri Amin

PART 3

The tension between methodological & philosophical naturalism here is a category mix-up (I should have also been more precise) but there is undeniable overlap.

Methodological flexibility cannot exist independently of philosophical grounding.

If we claim: “HCM does not presuppose naturalism; scholars merely follow evidence wherever it leads.”

This is confusing a procedural description with an ontological foundation.

Every methodology presupposes an ontology of what counts as “real,” and an epistemology of what counts as “knowable.”

The HCM’s reliance on empirical coherence, human linguistic intelligibility, and causal regularity presupposes those things exist and are reliable independent of further evidence.

That’s philosophical naturalism.

Even if a historian says “I can consider miracles,” the method still measures truth-claims by historical analogy and plausibility to human experience.

Hence: claiming HCM can neutrally weigh supernatural explanations without a metaphysical commitment is incoherent. The method’s definition of “evidence” has already filtered those out.

The second oversight here is failing to recognize where in the epistemic chain naturalism enters.

Naturalism is not a conclusion reached after evidence review (“we just haven’t found a miracle yet”).
It’s a pre-analysis stance about what kinds of causes or knowledge claims are valid before analysis begins.

This is what allows secular historians to:

trust documents,

date artifacts,

infer motives from human psychology,

and reconstruct causes by analogy with known natural processes.

All of these depend on believing that the world is law-governed and sense-accessible.

That belief is the philosophical naturalist premise, whether or not it’s acknowledged.

We shouldn't conflate a theoretical allowance for the supernatural with epistemic neutrality toward it.

Pre-modern Muslim, Jewish, and Christian historians did use rational-empirical methods, but always tethered epistemic reliability to a transcendental source (God guaranteeing reason and sense).

The HCM, by severing that tether, rests on self-justifying empiricism, which is what is a kind of “faith statement.”
Secular empiricism is not neutral.