Secular conservative John Derbyshire deconstructs folk metaphysics for his not-so-secular colleagues:
Folk metaphysics is the standard-issue set of notions our brains come equipped with to help us navigate our way around the everyday world, the world of what one philosopher called “medium-sized dry goods.”
For those purposes, folk metaphysics is excellent, and we all use it all the time. It includes cast-iron rules like “a thing can’t be in two places at once” and “the burning-up of a thing is irreversible.” There are more general principles like the living-nonliving division of matter and the slightly more sophisticated animal-vegetable-mineral one, or the “like can only come from like” rule (e.g. fishes don’t produce kittens) — in itself one instance of a bigger, more general group of folk-metaphysical ideas called “sympathetic magic.”
Then there are more approximate rules of thumb like “large solid objects are apt to be heavier than small ones” and “anything moving in a purposive way is an animal, or is pushed or pulled by one” (which is why Apaches, applying straightforward folk metaphysics, assumed there was a horse in the locomotive).
We all use these notions all the time, and are surprised, even sometimes disturbed, when they are violated — when, for example, a large solid-looking object turns out to have little weight. They’re terrifically useful, and are nothing to scoff at in themselves. Their instantiations in our nervous systems took hundreds of millions of years to evolve. Our thoughts are all wrapped around them, and our languages are wrapped around our thoughts. So really, nobody should be scoffing at folk metaphysics per se. You might as well scoff at your taste buds, or binocular vision. Folk metaphysics is just part of the neurological equipment.
As soon as you conduct a rigorous inquiry into reality, though, problems arise. This has been clear for a couple of hundred years, so stubborn resistance to it is, I think, scoff-worthy — the willful denial, for private psychological purposes, of something in plain sight.
Sodium is a poisonous metal; chlorine is a poisonous gas; put them together in chemical combination and you get sodium chloride — common table salt — which is neither poisonous, nor a metal, nor a gas. Whoa, what happened to “like can only come from like”? Evolution violates the same principle, which is why the mind resists it. Even Newton’s dull old laws of motion contradict folk metaphysics to some degree.