Methodological naturalism is a working rule for science rather than a metaphysical conclusion — so why do critics call it a hidden atheism?

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Naturalism commits you to a picture of nature as a closed causal order — but what justifies treating that closure as a premise rather than a discovery? Hume asked whether any observation could ever reveal a necessary connection between cause and effect Where do mathematical objects live if nature is all there is? Naturalists split between Platonism and treating math as a human construction Are physical laws real governing rules or just compact summaries of what we observe? If natural law is deterministic what room is left for free will and moral responsibility? Can naturalism ground objective norms — or does it collapse into describing what people happen to approve of? Consciousness is the hardest case for naturalism: eliminativists and panpsychists disagree about whether experience fits the picture at all If the mind is entirely natural — why does explaining consciousness from the third person keep running into the explanatory gap? Neuroscience and evolutionary biology have absorbed large parts of what philosophy once owned — what is left for a naturalized philosophy to do? The evolutionary debunking argument asks how much we can trust reasoning shaped by natural selection to track truth rather than survival