Methodological naturalism, hobbit style
Fellowship of the Ring, pg. 43:
Sam Gamgee was sitting in one corner near the fire, and opposite him was Ted Sandyman, the miller’s son; and there were various other rustic hobbits listening to their talk.
‘Queer things you do hear these days to be sure,’ said Sam.
‘Ah,’ said Ted, ‘you do, if you listen. But I can hear fireside-tales and children’s stories at home, if I want to.’
‘No doubt you can,’ retorted Sam, ‘and I daresay there’s more truth in some of them than you can reckon. Who invented the stories anyway? Take dragons now.’
‘No thank ‘ee,’ said Ted, "I won’t. I heard tell of them when I was a youngster, but there’s no call to believe in them now. There’s only one Dragon in Bywater, and that’s Green,’ he said, getting a general laugh.
‘All right,’ said Sam, laughing with the rest. ‘But what do you say about those Tree-men, these giants, as you might call them? They do say that one bigger than a tree was seen up away beyond the North Moors not long back.’
‘Who’s they?’
‘My cousin Hal for once. He works for Mr. Boffin at Overhill and goes up to the Northfarthing for the hunting. He saw one.’
‘Says he did, perhaps. Your Hal’s always saying he’s seen things; and maybe he sees things that ain’t there.’
‘But this one was as big as an elm tree, and walking — walking seven yards to a stride, if it was an inch.’
‘Then I bet it wasn’t an inch. What he saw was an elm tree, as like as not.’
‘But this one was walking, I tell you; and there ain’t no elm tree on the North Moors.’
‘Then Hal can’t have seen one,’ said Ted. There was some laughing and clapping: the audience seemed to think that Ted had scored a point.
Well, yes, it’s true that science, as a discipline, tends to be skeptical of claims that can have not been empirically verified.
However, your hobbit snippet is not a good analogy for how scientists work. Scientists would spend the evening around the campfire planning an expedition to Northfarthing to investigate whether or not there were any walking trees there.
When reputable birders reported hearing ivory-billed woodpeckers deep in a swampy forest in the south, did scientists sit around the campfire and poke fun at them? Sure, there was (and is) a lot of skepticism, but ornithologists responded by putting on a full-court press in an attempt to video and make sound recordings of the bird. This spring there was an organized professional effort to relocate the bird(s), and in addition ornithologists have enlisted the help of the amateur birding community.
Real-world examples of how scientists respond to unexpected observations seem much more relevant than fictional accounts of fictional sentient creatures discussing fictional events.
Comment by Don Baccus — June 13, 2006 @ 7:39 pm
This blog seriously needs a “preview” button, especially since the entry widget is only a few lines long …
Comment by Don Baccus — June 13, 2006 @ 7:40 pm
Maybe Cornell should send Hal out to the swamp to look for the ivory-billed woodpecker.
Comment by Amy Lester — June 13, 2006 @ 7:40 pm
I did my best to pick a relevant example :)
Comment by Don Baccus — June 13, 2006 @ 7:44 pm
While Don things that Wulfgar was referring to scientists, I think Hal in this story sounds a good bit more like IDers: Sam cited a reference (which, admittedly was not peer-reviewed, or scrutinized in any way like science is), and rather than discussing the claim, Hal dismissed it out of hand because of incredulity.
Don - personally, I just use a feed reader (Mozilla Firefox’s Sage extension, specifically), which gives me easy previewing of both posts and comments.
Comment by Dan — June 13, 2006 @ 7:51 pm
I have not read the comments, I apologize. 81 was a bit too many to sort through. However, I thought based on the post itself, you all might find a posting I wrote before to be of interest:
crevobits.blogspot.com/2006/02/history-creation-observables-and.html
Comment by Jonathan Bartlett — June 14, 2006 @ 8:12 pm
This comment thread is closed, and as soon as one of us has a few minutes we’ll do some major moving to the geswæpabinn. Amy– if you want to stay around here, you’re going to have to change something about your manner of arguing. Imagine you were talking with these people face to face, perhaps?
Dan– you absolutely need to stick to the rules. Please. This isn’t the place for name-calling.
—
Update: per blog policy ( and on two counts– degeneratively off-topic and in violation of the “rules of engagement”), the remainder of this thread has been moved to the geswæpabinn.
Comment by Admin — June 14, 2006 @ 8:54 pm