I was thinking of the apophatic theologians in the West, like Maimonides, Aquinas, and the others who say we can't know anything positive about God. They take the personifications to be metaphors.
No conflict between the philosopher's and the folk's gods? I gave you a link to an article of mine that pursues this point. Perhaps the biggest conflict is that the philosopher's god leads to deism, whereas what the naive folks want is theism. This is nowhere clearer than in Aristotle's emphasis on how the First Cause ignores everything outside itself. Aristotle created the First Cause in the aloof, elitist philosopher's image, as it were. So this absolute ground of being was an abstraction rather than anything that could comfort ordinary folks in their times of need.
Philosophically motivated negative theology likewise leads to deism rather than to theism, which suggests a methodological conflict. The philosophers use abstract arguments to learn the nature of reality, whereas the folk tell stories which they revere as literally and magically true. By contrast, the philosophers (and the Church fathers) view the myths as metaphors and allegories. This conflict shows up in Paul's letters which apply the Gnostic and Mystery Religions' distinction between levels of initiation. So the folk are at the lower level, while the philosophers have a higher understanding of religion's function, and this conflict is formalized in the New Testament itself.
Then there are the commonsense conflicts. People have bodies, so where would the First Cause's body have come from, if that cause were a person? Christianity gets around this obvious conflict between an abstract, immaterial ground of being, on the one hand, and a human-like person with whom we can socialize, on the other, with its Trinitarian conception of God. Christians get to have their cake and eat it too: they get the divine personhood in Jesus, the son of God who has a human body, and they get their ethereal ground of being in the oneness that supposedly somehow unites the three divine persons, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Again, this doctrine is infamous for being self-contradictory, so the conflict between the elite and folk conceptions has been formalized in Christianity (rather than being something I'm conjuring from the top of my head).
Aristotle's philosophy was certainly more naturalistic than Plato's, because Aristotle's was more empirical. But there's long been a divide within science between rationalists and empiricists. Are the products of theoretical physicists who rely more on math than on experiments naturalistic? Is theoretical physics still a science? There's debate about this among scientists. See, for example, Lee Smolin's criticisms. As I said, "naturalistic" is an honourific title, so the meaning of this word is contentious. My use of the word takes into account historical developments. But there's no equivocation in saying that one thing can be naturalistic or protoscientific relative to something else. It's just a question of analogy. I'm contrasting all of Greek philosophy, including Plato, to Greek folk religion, and I'm asking which discourse is more like modern science. There's no equivocation there.
Your bluster and personal attacks are starting to bore me, though. I have a Ph.D. in philosophy. I'm aware of the debates in philosophy. But I'll thank you to keep your economist's scientism from infecting the discussion. Philosophy isn't a science. Unlike the economists who pretend to be more rigorous than they are by resorting to obscure math that's untethered to experimental testing, to help con the public into accepting plutocracy, philosophers recognize that their discipline is as much art as science. We can define our terms as we like as long as we're clear about it and there's some use in doing so. The point of calling the ancient Greek philosophers relatively naturalistic or protoscientific is that it captures what was at stake in the rise of modernity: the return to pagan humanism and the escape from the morass of totalitarian Christendom.
