Scientism

Stephen Hawking and Bad Philosophy

With the passing of physicist Stephen Hawking, the encomia are rolling in. Hawking no doubt deserves most of the tributes and accolades he is receiving. But a bit of balance is in order: we should not forget the bad philosophy he has promoted. Herewith, a repost from 9 October 2010, slightly redacted. I was initially planning to go through The Grand Design chapter by chapter but soon realized it would have been a waste of time given the low quality of the initial chapters.

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Notes on Chapter One of Stephen Hawking, The Grand Design

Many thanks to reader David Parker for sending me a copy of Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, The Grand Design (Bantam, 2010). Not a book worth buying, but graciously accepted gratis! When physicists need money, they scribble books for popular consumption. But who can blame them: doing physics is hard while writing bad philosophy is easy.

Numbers in parentheses are page references.

The first chapter, "The Mystery of Being," gets off to a rocky start with a curious bit of anthropomorphism: the universe is described as "by turns kind and cruel," (5) when it is obviously neither. Imputing human attitudes to nature is unscientific the last time I checked. And then there is the chapter's title. I would have thought that the purpose of science is to dispel mystery. But let that pass. The authors remind us that we humans ask Big Questions about the nature of reality and the origin of the universe, e.g., "Did the universe need a creator?" (5) True, but the past tense of that question betrays a curious bias, as if a creator is a mere cosmic starter-upper as opposed to a being ongoingly involved in the existence of the world at each instant. It is the latter that sophisticated theists maintain.

The Big Questions traditionally belong to philosophy, but we are told that "philosophy is dead." (5) Unfortunately for the authors, "Philosophy always buries its undertakers," as Etienne Gilson famously observed in The Unity of Philosophical Experience (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1937, p. 306) He calls this the first law of philosophical experience. Memorize it, and have it at the ready the next time someone says something silly like "philosophy is dead." As a codicil to the Gilsonian dictum, I suggest "and presides over their oblivion."

Philosophy is dead, the authors opine, because she "has not kept up with modern developments in the sciences, particularly physics." (5) To get answers to such questions as Why is there something rather than nothing? Why do we exist? and Why this particular set of laws and not some other? we must turn to physics. (These three questions are listed on p. 10) It will be very surprising if physics — physics alone without any smuggled-in philosophical additions — can answer the first and third questions. But it will never answer the second question. For we are conscious and self-conscious moral agents, and no purely physical explanation of consciousness, self-consciousness and all it entails can be derived from physics alone.

What I expect the authors to do is to smuggle in various philosophical theses along with their physics. But if they do so — if they stray the least bit from pure physics — then they prove that philosophy is alive after all, in their musings. What they will then be doing is not opposing philosophy as such, but urging their philosophy on us, all the while hiding from us the fact that it is indeed philosophy.

That's a pretty shabby tactic, if you want my opinion. (And there you have it, even if you don't want it.) You posture as if you are opposing all philosophy which you claim is "dead," which presumably means 'cognitively worthless,' and then you go on to make blatantly philosophical assertions which are neither properly clarified as to their sense, nor supported by anything that could count as rigorous argumentation. For example, in Chapter 2, the authors opine that "free will is just an illusion." (32) The sloppy 'reasoning' laden with rhetorical questions that leads up to this obviously philosophical assertion is nothing that could be justified by pure physics.

Quantum theory is brought up and the suggestion is floated that "the universe itself has no single history, nor even an independent existence." (6) It has "every possible history." A little later we are introduced to M-theory:

. . . M-theory predicts that a great many universes were created out of nothing. Their creation does not require the intervention of some supernatural being or god. Rather,these multiple universes arise naturally from physical law. (8-9)

The writing here is quite inept. If the authors want to say that these universes came into being out of nothing, they should say that, and not say that they were created out of nothing. Creation, whether out of nothing or out of something, implies a creator. It is also inept to speak of 'intervention.' If God creates a universe, he does not intervene in it; he causes it to exist in the first place. One can intervene only in what already exists. Such sloppy writing does not inspire confidence, and suggests that the thinking behind the writing is equally sloppy.

But even ignoring these infelicities of expression, it is a plain contradiction to say that these universes comes into being out of nothing and that they arise naturally from physical law. Whatever physical law is, it is not nothing! That's clear, I hope. So why don't our physicists say what they mean, namely that these multiple universes came into being, not from nothing, but from physical law. That would be non-contradictory although it would prompt the question as to the nature and existence of physical law or laws.

Part of the problem here is that the authors want to do philosophy with the resources of physics alone. They are not content just to assume that there are physical laws and that the cosmos exists and then get on with the their proper task of figuring our what those laws are. They want an explanation from physics of why there is a cosmos in the first place. As a result the end up talking nonsense. Wanting an explanation from physics. they cite physical laws. Wanting a philosophical explanation, they say that the universe arose from nothing. But they miss the blatant contradiction: the cosmos cannot both arise from nothing and from physical laws since the latter are not nothing.

If, on the other hand, they use 'nothing' in some special sense which allows physical laws to be nothing, then they are playing a shabby semantic trick.

Another apparent contradiction worth noting: After mentioning quantum theory in the Chapter 1, the authors assure us in Chapter 2 that "scientific determinism" is "the basis of all modern science." (30) How quantum indeterminacy and determinism are supposed to jibe, is not explained. But hey, when the idea is to make a fast buck, who cares about such niceties as logical consistency?

Not only did many universes come into existence out of physical law (or is it out of nothing?), but "Each universe has many possible histories and many possible states at later times, that is at times like the present . . . ." (9) Most of these states are unsuitable for the existence of any form of life. It is our presence that "selects out from this vast array only those universes that are compatible with our existence." (9) That's a neat trick given that universes "have no independent existence." (6) If so, then we have no independent existence and cannot function as the "lords of creation" (9) who select among the vast array of universes.

But I want to be fair. Perhaps later chapters will remove some of the murk. There is also this consideration: Even bad books are good if they stimulate thought. But don't buy it. Borrow it from a library.

As I always say, "Never buy a book you haven't read."

When Physicists Get Physical: A Tale of Sex and Scientism

Allegedly, Lawrence Krauss is a sexual predator. I'll leave it to you to decide which is worse, his philosophical incompetence or his sexual predation. Both are forms of seduction, one cerebral, the other carnal.

Scientism, Underbelief, and Overbelief

The secular nail their colors to the mast of scientism. Or most of them do. Their attitude is an amalgam of underbelief and overbelief. Their underbelief is their belief that science alone is genuine knowledge. Their overbelief is that this is so – – when it is plain that it is not something known scientifically.

There is so much that we know that we do not know by means of the natural sciences. Some examples for you to think about.

There is logical knowledge. How do you know that the A and O forms of the traditional square of opposition are convertible while the E and O forms are not? By empirical observation and experiment?
There is mathematical knowledge.
There is semantic knowledge.
There is moral knowledge.

First Philosophy or Scientism?

I was going to add to this old draft from 15 December 2009, but it looks like I won't be getting around to it. So here it is.

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Robert Cummins (Meaning and Mental Representation, MIT Press, 1989, p. 12) regards it as a mistake "for philosophers to address the question of mental representation in abstraction from any particular scientific theory or theoretical framework." Thus we ought not naively ask, What is mental representation? as if there is something called mental representation that is common to folk psychology and such theories as orthodox computationalism and neuroscience. "Mental representation is a theoretical assumption, not a commonplace of ordinary discourse."

The right way to proceed, according to Cummins, is to "pick a theoretical framework and ask what explanatory role mental representation plays in that framework and what the representation relation must be if that explanatory role is to be well grounded." In other words, one takes a theory such as orthodox computationalism and then one asks: what must the nature of mental representation be if this theory is to be both true and explanatory?

So the question of mental representation is not a question of 'first philosophy,' i.e., a question to be settled independently of, and prior to, empirical research, but a question in the philosophy of science exactly analogous to the following question in the philosophy of physics: what is the nature of space given that General Relativity is true and explanatory? The properties of physical space are for physics to determine. Philosophy's role is correspondingly modest, that of a handmaiden. To coin a phrase: philosophia ancilla scientiae, philosophy is the handmaiden of science, similarly as it was the handmaiden of theology in the Medieval period. Philosophy becomes the philosophy of science. And according to Quine, who is quoted by Cummins on the fontispiece of his book, "Philosophy of science is philosophy enough."

It ought to be the same, Cummins thinks, with psychology. Whether or not there are mental representations becomes the question whether or not the best theories in cognitive science and psychology posit mental representations, and the nature of the representation relation is to be read off from whichever theory is taken to be true and most explanatory.

But there is a problem with this view. If we want to know about physical space and the nature of matter, we turn to the physicist. And if we want to know about the brain, we turn to the neuroscientist. But if we want to know about the relation of mind and brain, we cannot base ourselves solely on empirical science.

Here is one consideration. The extant empirical theories imply the existence of mental representations. But surely their existence is not obvious. Looking at a photograph of a mountain, I become aware of the mountain and some of its features via the picture. Here it makes sense to say of the picture that it is a representation of the mountain. But when I look directly at a mountain, there is no phenomenological evidence of any epistemic intermediary or representation: I see the mountain itself. I don't see sense-data or representations or any kind of epistemic deputy.

Perhaps I will be told that I am nonetheless aware of an internal image but not aware of being aware of it. Compare the case of walking into a room and seeing a depiction of Hillary Clinton so realistic and convincing that I take it to be Hillary herself. In such a case I am aware of an image, but not aware of being aware of an image. Why couldn't it be the same with outer perception? One crucial difference is that I can come to be aware of the Hillary-image as an image. But I cannot come to be aware of any supposed internal image that mediates my outer perception. This is particularly obvious if the internal image is a brain state. I cannot, while gazing at the mountain, 'focus inwardly' and become aware of the brain state that is supposedly mediating my perception of the mountain. Given this fact, I suggest that it is unintelligible to say that there is an internal image that mediates outer perception. The word 'image is' being misused. An image that I cannot become aware of as an image is in no intelligible sense an image of something.

No doubt the brain and its states are part of the causal basis of perception. And there is no doubt that an organism's brain is in (some) of the states it is in because of what is happening in its environment, e.g., bright light is being reflected from a snow field into the organism's eyes. But to say that some of the brain states represent the environment makes no sense assuming that 'represent' has the sense it has when we attend to the phenomenology of representative consciousness. To speak of material representations literally in the head is to read back into a third person conception of the world notions that make sense only from a first-person point of view.

You may agree with what I just said or not. But the discussion we will have about these matters surely does not belong to any empirical science. It belongs to first philosophy. The question of whether there are mental representations at all, for example, cannot arise within disciplines that presupposes their existence. And the relation between a first- and third-person view of the world cannot be treated within an exclusively third-person point of view. Finally, there is the point that the claim that science alone can clarify these questions is itself unscientific and so an instance of (negative) first philosophy.

A Physicist’s Petitio Principii

One of my self-appointed tasks is to beat up on physicists when they play at philosophy and makes fools of themselves. The following is from an interview with Richard Muller in Physics Today:

PT: You mention in your introduction that some physicists have concluded that the flow of time is an illusion. Why do you think that’s not the case?

MULLER: The flow of time does not exist in the usual spacetime diagram of physics. Time is mysterious; in any relativistic coordinate system, it is linked to space. And yet time is different—and I mean much more than simply a sign in the metric. Time flows. Choose any coordinate system and you can stand still in space but not in time. That different behavior breaks the otherwise glorious spacetime symmetry. Moreover, there is a special moment in time we call “now.” No such special location exists in the dimensions of space.

Is this guy serious? His argument boils down to: The flow of time is not an illusion because time flows! There is no spacetime symmetry because there is a special moment in time called 'NOW.' Well thank you very much for resolving this thorny question at long last. The 'diameter' of this circular reasoning is embarrassingly short. Both interviewee and interviewer need a course in Logic 101.

The following entry will give you some idea of the theory that our physicist thinks he has refuted.

Poor Barry Manilow

Here:

In an experiment published in 2000, the psychologist Thomas Gilovich and his colleagues asked undergraduates to wear a piece of clothing that they found embarrassing—a t-shirt with a picture of singer-songwriter Barry Manilow on it. After putting on the shirt, the undergraduates had to spend some time in a room with other students and were later asked to guess how many of the other students noticed what they were wearing. The undergraduates tended to overestimate the proportion by a large margin, and did the same when asked to wear a t-shirt with a positive image on it, like Bob Marley or Martin Luther King Jr. In study after study, experimental subjects thought that other people would notice them much more than they actually did.

Another study that confirms what we already knew. Were any tax dollars used to fund it? In a scientistic culture ignorant of its own rich traditions it is thought that only what is 'scientifically' validated can be taken seriously. I am not denying that a study such as this one might have some slight value.

More interesting, I should think, would be a study of why Marley and King have a positive image and Manilow a negative one, not that I would be caught dead listening to Manilow's schmaltz, except for analytic and culture-critical purposes. Or a study why there is a preponderance among the young of Che Guevara T-shirts over, say, Maggie Thatcher T-shirts.

I am tired of refuting this species of bushwa. Let somebody else do it.

We humans naturally philosophize. But we don't naturally philosophize well. So when science journalists and scientists try their hands at it they often make a mess of it. (See my Scientism category for plenty of examples.) This is why there is need of the discipline of philosophy one of whose chief offices is the exposure and debunking of bad philosophy and pseudo-philosophy of the sort exhibited in so many 'scientific' articles. Although it would be a grave mistake to think that the value of philosophy resides in its social utility, philosophy does earn its social keep in its critical and debunking function.

Free Will Meets Neuroscience

Here is an excerpt from Alfred R. Mele, Free Will: Action Theory Meets Neuroscience

In a recent article, Libet writes: "it is only the final ‘act now’ process that produces the voluntary act. That ‘act now’ process begins in the brain about 550 msec before the act, and it begins unconsciously" (2001, p. 61).10 "There is," he says, "an unconscious gap of about 400 msec between the onset of the cerebral process and when the person becomes consciously aware of his/her decision or wish or intention to act." (Incidentally, a page later, he identifies what the agent becomes aware of as "the intention/wish/urge to act" [p. 62].) Libet adds: "If the ‘act now’ process is initiated unconsciously, then conscious free will is not doing it."

I have already explained that Libet has not shown that a decision to flex is made or an intention to flex acquired at -550 ms. But even if the intention emerges much later, that is compatible with an "act now" process having begun at -550 ms. One might say that "the ‘act now’ process" in Libet’s spontaneous subjects begins with the formation or acquisition of a proximal intention to flex, much closer to the onset of muscle motion than -550 ms, or that it begins earlier, with the beginning of a process that issues in the intention.11 We can be flexible about that (just as we can be flexible about whether the process of my baking my frozen pizza began when I turned my oven on to pre-heat it, when I opened the oven door five minutes later to put the pizza in, when I placed the pizza on the center rack, or at some other time). Suppose we say that "the ‘act now’ process" begins with the unconscious emergence of an urge to flex – or with a pretty reliable relatively proximal causal contributor to urges to flex – at about -550 ms and that the urge plays a significant role in producing a proximal intention to flex many milliseconds later. We can then agree with Libet that, given that the "process is initiated unconsciously, . . . conscious free will is not doing it" – that is, is not initiating "the ‘act now’ process." But who would have thought that conscious free will has the job of producing urges? In the philosophical literature, free will’s primary locus of operation is typically identified as deciding (or choosing); and for all Libet has shown, if his subjects decide (or choose) to flex "now," they do so consciously.

What Libet et al. want to show is that the notion that conscious willing plays a genuine role in the etiology of a behavior such as flexing a finger is illusory. Their evidence for this is that the process in the brain that initiates the action begins some 550 milliseconds before the action and is unconscious. Only 400 msecs later does the subject become aware of his wish or urge or intention or decision to act. This is supposed to show that the conscious intention is not causally efficacious and that conscious will is an illusion.

Mele rebuts this argument by showing that it trades on a confusion of decisions/intentions on the one hand and wishes and urges on the other. To want to do X is not the same as to decide to do X. Phil may want another Fat Tire Ale but decide not to drink another because he has already decimated Bill's supply and doesn't want to presume on his host. So even if the wanting to do action A begins in the brain a half a second before the doing of A, and is unconscious, it doesn't follow that the decision to do A begins in the brain a half second before the doing of A and is unconscious. Free will is displayed in decisions and choosings, not in wants and urges.

Basically, what Mele does quite skillfully in this article is show the indispensability of accurate conceptual analysis and phenomenology for the proper interpretation of empirical findings. The real illusion here is the supposition that the empirical findings of neuroscience can by themselves shed any light.

Wisdom from Putnam on Science and Scientism

Here is a repost from 2009 in observance of the passing of the distinguished Harvard philosopher. Please note: 'Hilary,' not 'Hillary.'

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Hilary Putnam, Mathematics, Matter and Method (Cambridge University Press, 1975), pp. xiii (emphasis added):

. . . I regard science as an important part of man's knowledge of reality; but there is a tradition with which I would not wish to be identified, which would say that scientific knowledge is all of man's knowledge. I do not believe that ethical statements are expressions of scientific knowledge; but neither do I agree that they are not knowledge at all. The idea that the concepts of truth, falsity, explanation, and even understanding are all concepts which belong exclusively to science seems to me to be a perversion . . . .

Putnam does not need the MP's imprimatur and nihil obstat, but he gets them anyway, at least with respect to the above quotation. The italicized sentence is vitally important. In particular, you will be waiting a long time if you expect evolutionary biology to provide any clarification of the crucial concepts mentioned. See in particular Putnam's "Does Evolution Explain Representation?" in Renewing Philosophy (Harvard University Press, 1992).

Edward Feser on Jerry A. Coyne

In Omnibus of Fallacies, Ed Feser applies his formidable analytic and polemical skills to that sorry specimen of scientism, Jerry Coyne. The First Things review begins like this:

Faith versus Fact is some kind of achievement. Biologist Jerry Coyne has managed to write what might be the worst book yet published in the New Atheist genre. True, the competition for that particular distinction is fierce. But among other volumes in this metastasizing literature, each has at least some small redeeming feature. For example, though Lawrence Krauss’s A Universe from Nothing is bad as philosophy, it is middling as pop science. Christopher Hitchens’s God Is Not Great was at least written by someone who could write like Christopher Hitchens. Though devoid of interest, Sam Harris’s Letter to a Christian Nation is brief. Even PZ Myers’s book The Happy Atheist has at least one advantage over Coyne’s book: It came out first.

Why do I refer to Coyne as a "sorry specimen of scientism?" Is that a nice thing to say? See here, for starters.

More Scientistic Bullshit

Yet another exercise in silly scientism. Shut up already with this stuff. I've refuted this genre of crap too many times before. Here is a sample: Bull Meets Shovel: Could Consciousness be a Conjuring Trick?

Lawrence Krauss

His latest outburst sullies the pages of The New Yorker. When readers brought it to my attention, I thought I might write a response, but then thought better about wasting my time, once again, on a fool and his foolishness. And now I see that my efforts are unnecessary: Edward Feser has done the job in the pages of Public Discourse.

Ed is uncommonly gifted at polemic. He characterizes Krauss as a "professional amateur philosopher." I wish I had come up with that brilliancy. But now that I have the phrase you can expect me to use it.

Here are some anti-Krauss entries of mine.

Why Physics Needs Philosophy

A short piece by Tim Maudlin. Good as far as it goes, but it doesn't go deep enough. Maudlin rightly opposes the "reigning attitude":

The reigning attitude in physics has been “shut up and calculate”: solve the equations, and do not ask questions about what they mean. But putting computation ahead of conceptual clarity can lead to confusion.

He has some other useful things to say about philosophy's role in conceptual clarification. But there is no mention of what ought to strike one as a major task: an explanation of how recherché physical theories relate to the world we actually live in, the world in its human involvement, what Edmund Husserl called die Lebenswelt, the life-world. This is a task that falls to philosophy, but not to contemporary analytic philosophy with its woeful ignorance of the phenomenological tradition. On the other hand, judging by the philosophical scribblings of physicists, they would make a mess of it too.

A related task of philosophy is to debunk and expose the bad philosophy churned out by physicists in their spare time when they need to turn a buck and play the public intellectual. Understandable: doing physics is hard while writing bad philosophy is easy. Think Lawrence Krauss for a recent prime offender. And then there is the awful Hawking-Mlodinow book mentioned by Maudlin, entitled The Grand Design.

Five years ago I began a series on it. But the first chapters were so bad, I didn't bother to proceed beyond my first entry. Having just re-read that post, it stands up well.

One more point about Maudlin. He (mis)uses 'mystical' as a pejorative, thereby betraying his ignorance of the subject of mysticism. That's an Ayn Rand-y type of blunder.

Physicist George Ellis on Physicist and Pseudo-Philosopher Lawrence Krauss

From Scientific American, 22 July 2014 (HT: Karl White), emphasis added:

Horgan: Lawrence Krauss, in A Universe from Nothing, claims that physics has basically solved the mystery of why there is something rather than nothing. Do you agree?

Ellis: Certainly not. He is presenting untested speculative theories of how things came into existence out of a pre-existing complex of entities, including variational principles, quantum field theory, specific symmetry groups, a bubbling vacuum, all the components of the standard model of particle physics, and so on. He does not explain in what way these entities could have pre-existed the coming into being of the universe, why they should have existed at all, or why they should have had the form they did. And he gives no experimental or observational process whereby we could test these vivid speculations of the supposed universe-generation mechanism. How indeed can you test what existed before the universe existed? You can’t.

Thus what he is presenting is not tested science. It’s a philosophical speculation, which he apparently believes is so compelling he does not have to give any specification of evidence that would confirm it is true. Well, you can’t get any evidence about what existed before space and time came into being. Above all he believes that these mathematically based speculations solve thousand year old philosophical conundrums, without seriously engaging those philosophical issues. The belief that all of reality can be fully comprehended in terms of physics and the equations of physics is a fantasy. As pointed out so well by Eddington in his Gifford lectures, they are partial and incomplete representations of physical, biological, psychological, and social reality.

And above all Krauss does not address why the laws of physics exist, why they have the form they have, or in what kind of manifestation they existed before the universe existed (which he must believe if he believes they brought the universe into existence). Who or what dreamt up symmetry principles, Lagrangians, specific symmetry groups, gauge theories, and so on? He does not begin to answer these questions.

It’s very ironic when he says philosophy is bunk and then himself engages in this kind of attempt at philosophy. It seems that science education should include some basic modules on Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hume, and the other great philosophers, as well as writings of more recent philosophers such as Tim Maudlin and David Albert.

That's exactly right. As I said in an earlier post,

I fear that a lot of our contemporary scientists are hopelessly bereft of general culture. They are brilliant in their specialties but otherwise uneducated. But that does not stop the likes of Dawkins and Krauss and Coyne and Hawking and Mlodinow from spouting off about God and time and the meaning of life . . . . They want to play the philosopher without doing any 'homework.' They think it's easy: you just shoot your mouth off.

My Scientism category contains detailed critiques of Krauss and other 'scientisticists' to give an ugly name to an ugly bunch of 'philosophistines.' I coined 'philosophistine' years ago to refer to philistines when it comes to philosophy.

Jerry Coyne’s Latest Outburst re: Pope Francis, Big Bang and Evolution

It doesn't merit a lot of attention, but I will mention two stupid moves that Jerry Coyne makes. Or if not stupid, then intellectually dishonest.

First, Coyne states that "We know now that the universe could have originated from 'nothing' through purely physical processes, if you see 'nothing' as the 'quantum vacuum' of empty space." By the same token, we now know that Jerry Coyne is a fool if you see 'fool' as equivalent in meaning to 'one who thinks that a substantive question can be answered by a semantic trick.'

Second, Coyne maintains that the belief that human beings have souls "flies in the face of science." In other words, the belief in question is logically inconsistent with natural science. Why? Because, "We have no evidence for souls, as biologists see our species as simply the product of naturalistic evolution from earlier species." The reasoning is this:

1. Biologists qua biologists see the human biological species as simply the product of evolution.

Therefore

2. Biology uncovers no evidence of souls.

Therefore

3. Biology rules out the existence of souls.

(1) is true. (2) is a very unsurprising logical consequence of (1). For biology, as a natural science, is confined to the study of the empirically accessible features of living things, including human animals. It is therefore no surprise at all that biology turns up no evidence of souls, or of consciousness or self-consciousness for that matter. By the same token, cosmology and quantum mechanics uncover no evidence that anything is alive.

The move from (2) to (3), however, is a howling non sequitur. (In plain English, (3) does not logically follow from (2), and it is obvious that it doesn't.) Biology is simply in no position to uncover any evidence of souls that there might be, and it shows a failure to grasp what it is that biology studies to think that such evidence would be accessible to biology.

To argue from (2) to (3) would be like arguing from

4. Mathematics uncovers no evidence that anything in nature can be studied using complex (imaginary) numbers.

Therefore

5. Mathematics rules out the existence of anything in nature that can be studied using complex (imaginary) numbers.

That too is a howling non sequitur: we know that alternating current theory makes essential use of complex numbers.

At the root of Coyne's foolishness is scientism, the view that the only genuine knowledge is natural-scientific knowledge. Scientism is the epistemology of naturalism, the view that reality is exhausted by the space-time system. Both are philosophical views; neither is scientific. There are powerful arguments against both.

Enough beating up of a cripple for one day. And that reminds me: Nietzsche in Twilight of the Idols refers to Kant as a concept-cripple (Begriffskrueppel). What would that make Coyne? A stillborn concept-cripple?

More critique of Coyne here. The man should stick to biology. And the same goes for Dawkins.