Chonky Boi vs. Objective Idealism…?

Atheist* youtuber Ben Watkins has made a video pitting his “objective idealism” against presuppositionalism. I put a star next to “atheist” because he explains what he means by the label in a helpful 2019 interview. In an interesting turn of events, Eli Ayala is bringing the stalwart Pillows onto the Revealed Apologetics youtube channel to respond (live stream, 7 days from now and counting).

Here’s the link to Watkins’ video.

Here’s the link to Eli and Josh’s livestream response. (I should be participating in the chat under my real name Scott Terry, if any of my readers – or haters – wish to show up and either praise or intellectually destroy me).

I wanted to offer a brief response as well, but first, some preliminaries:

• Watkins has always struck me as one of the well-meaning unbelievers (if there can be such given the truth of Calvinist theology). Fantasy author George MacDonald often said a man isn’t well-launched on the path to being a true Christian until he’s begun to have honest* doubts. Honest doubts, as opposed to all the disingenuous and pompous bravado that too often characterizes atheist culture. (Far too often characterizes Christian apologists as well and MacDonald had both in mind in his quote). But I’ve always thought Watkins’ material civil, fair, and worth our time. God must send us his sort to help better clarify our positions and to keep us honest.

• I’m excited he’s doing so, at least ostensibly, from an idealist perspective (more on this in a sec). In the comments of his video, someone informed him Van Til wrote an entire book pitting Christianity against Idealism. Indeed, it was his doctoral dissertation! Watkins said he was unaware and would look into it. Yes, I hope he does. So much of Van Til’s unique apologetic insight comes from his realizing how Reformed theology (especially its metaphysics) informed a unique epistemology that resolved so much that was at issue between the “idealists” and “pragmatists” of his own day. Having atheists take up the idealist position will simultaneously force presuppers back into Van Til’s primary literature while also, hopefully, getting them to study Sellars. In my view, Sellars (and his so-called “left-wing” acolytes) ought to be our absolute (pardon the pun) favorite non-Christian philosophers. That more lay-level presuppers aren’t reading and interacting with Sellars (and especially Brandom) is a travesty. Maybe Watkins can help us resolve it?

…which launches us immediately into our work:

When approaching a piece of philosophy (or, in our case, an ambiguous and wide-ranging video with lots of conceptually-opaque claims), Dr. Bahnsen has taught us to go through, disambiguate, boil down, and try to get a bare-bones outline of what’s actually happening.

When we do so with Watkins’ video, we find ourselves obliged to trim away his philosophical orientation. For example, he says his epistemological views are in sympathy with “Kant, Hegel, Hume.” Really? This tells us literally nothing since there have been worlds of epistemic speculation over the years that might fall in that milieu. “Me? My epistemic sympathies? Well, sir, they lie with Socrates, Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Plantinga, Dooyeweerd, Carnap, Quine, and Van Inwagen!” Say whaaa?

Moreover, Watkins’ attempt to orient what he means by “objective idealism” is no more helpful. He lists names (including Sellars), as well as suggesting that his metaphysic will be informed by Sebastian Rodl’s book Self-Consciousness and Objectivity (3.33 min in). Yet, we never get any citations and it’s not clear what of Rodl’s is being used or how. So again, we must trim this away. We appreciate the nod towards background reading but it does nothing for us in the present, that is: in helping deal with Watkins’ exact claims and argument. (We extend some leeway to Watkins on this point since his video is only 20-odd minutes; nevertheless, we must trim his orientation out and focus on what, if anything, leftover is substantial. We aint up in here trying to argue about who belongs where on what sort of philosophical venn diagram).

What about those exact claims and arguments?

We’re going to get a two-step approach:

1 – Autonomous reasoning is true, therefore, presuppositionalism is false (or “undercut” as Watkins says).

and

2 – A “turning of the tables” on presuppers, using a divine hiddenness objection (perhaps inspired by recent comments from Dr. Alex Malpass); namely:

If presup were true, then there’d be no unbelievers.
There are unbelievers (denying the consequent)
Therefore, presup is false.

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My Response?

Seems to me Watkins fails in step 1 by providing a view of autonomy no idealist would hold (but again, we’re not worried about labels. Where he fits in the scheme of positions and what label is most apt is irrelevant here), but additionally it undermines his entire case since the sort of autonomy he’s describing is impossible, even on his own account…as my friend’s chonky cat is about to demonstrate.

As for step 2, comments he makes to justify divine hiddenness objections over and against religious experience claims undermine his objectivist program in step 1!

I’d also like to point out a cheeky paradox that will be particularly troublesome for Watkins, though idealists like Hegel as well as many of the theistic British Idealists would have expected it. It’s called the “Knowability Paradox”.

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To begin, here’s Watkins on autonomy (9:16 into the vid):

“The autonomy of reason constitutes freedom from external control or influence. And reason’s independence from collective or individual desire or authority. The term “autonomy” is derived from the Greek “autonomos” meaning: to have its own laws. Kant famously characterized his formula for autonomy or categorical imperative as the ability to act in accordance with self-given laws or rules. Rather than the arbitrary appetites of our desires or the whims of some authority. I will argue similarly that reason is autonomous, in that reason is independent of any subject whatsoever and reasoning is a self-governing act.”

Compare this with his important metaphysical statement at 9.02:

“Knowing and being are necessarily part of the same rationalist whole.”

These seem in obvious contention, no?

If knowing and being are necessarily bound together, how can we turn around and say “knowing” is autonomous in the way laid out above?

Moreover, let’s dig in this particular knife (or, as we’ll see: claws) a little deeper:

My friend has a cat. The cat is comically fat. Consider the following statement:

“Your cat chonky, bruh. He a chonky boi!”

Must we, to understand this, subject ourselves to linguistic rules, at the very least? Of course, Watkins might reply that in doing so – and to the extent our thoughts must be expressed linguistically – we only have a trivial sort of syntactical submission to authority. It doesn’t negate a thought’s content being “autonomous.” Ok, but even if we grant that – and that’s granting a lot – how to tell the difference between a chonky boi and a skinny boi? Am I at liberty to conceptualize my friend’s cat as “thin” if, the reality is, my friend’s cat chonky? It seems Watkins must grant this else give up his strong position on “autonomy.” (But to grant it is to give up objectivity!)

Further, this sort of consideration has lead idealists – at least since Hegel – to reason “upwards and outwards.” That is: to a wider and wider scope of an idealist holism, resulting in “absolute” mind uber alles. Whether it’s Wordsworth saying that if only we know the rose, we’d know all reality; Bosanquet saying that to know two lines are parallel we must know all points of space; or Van Til saying that to know the cow in the field requires us to know *all* facts – this line of thinking has not lead to an “autonomy” of reasoning for idealists historically as it has for Watkins. Quite the opposite. It’s lead to the utmost bondage of human reason to absolute mind! (Not saying Van Til was an idealist, but in this respect he’s formally similar. I had to add this edit else Lane Tipton would put out a hit on me…)

How does Watkins avoid the “absolute” of Hegel (or even of the British Idealists)? He wants the “Many” but not the “One.” We’re not told in this short video. Maybe he gives us a hint elsewhere? As it is, until this seeming contradiction is resolved for us, we presuppers (based on this one video) seem justified in suggesting that Watkins’ stated metaphysic contradicts his view of autonomy.

Gotta have that One and that Many my dude. And the two must fit together naturally in a way that’s motivated by our overall theory. The British Idealists (said Van Til) worked themselves to the One, but cut out the Many. The “pragmatists” had the Many, but not the One. (If only there were a position available where the One and the Many were equally ultimate *and* personal *and* loving *and*, according to the theory, decided to have revealed Himself as such…)

“But I know I have hands!” cries Watkins.

What are hands without fingers without arms without Watkins without Watkins’ parents, without …ad infinitum…? Just a disjointed (heh) mess/mass of particulars. An impossible-to-autonomously-conceptualize “Many”.

Say he a chonky boi without sacrificing your presumed autonomy on the altar of the absolute…!

Secondly, and a little perniciously, let’s look at how Watkins talks about religious experience in relation to divine hiddenness (at 18:05 in):

“…however, there is not such widespread inter-subjective experiences [of God]. Not everyone has theistic religious experience. And most subjects of religious experience widely disagree about the fundamental nature, content, and significance of religious experience. Some people never believe or no longer believe God exists. This non-theism is neither the result of emotional or behavioral opposition towards God…”

I’m just going to make a note here, then move on:

I don’t understand how Watkins’ view that “knowing and being are part of the same whole” can be reconciled with his rejection of the “knowing” of many religious experiencers, nor with their having religious experiences to begin with. If knowing and being are part of the same whole (as Watkins needs them to be to get some semblance of objectivity in his epistemology), then why does this suddenly not apply to religious experience? Why is my experience of a chonky boi an actual experience of the whole (I’m sure Watkins grants there are some legitimate chonky boi experiences) while my experience of God is not?

Seems like some of what Dr. Bahnsen called: “well-concealed axe-grinding” going on ’round here…

Finally, let’s briefly discuss Fitch’s Knowability Paradox.

To begin, we have to, again, bring up Watkins’ idealist metaphysic, where knowing and being are part of the same whole, thus bridging the subject / object gap that’s plagued epistemologists at least since Kant. Consider Watkins, starting at 6.22:

“The form of objective idealism I’ll be defending here is roughly the view that “reason” is a fundamental and primitive idea. To use some Hegelian jargon, we can have knowledge of the world in and for itself by understanding any determinate concept in itself, then out of itself by way of negation.

This dialectic implies that humans are rational animals capable of reason or understanding reasons. To have certain beliefs by way of concepts or ideas. Because the world itself has a rational and intelligible structure.”

That last line really does the trick, eh?

“…the world itself has a rational and intelligible structure.”

This isn’t a throw-away concept for Watkins. It’s a very important metaphysical proposition which plays a big role in his epistemology. Another way of saying this is to say: all truths are knowable. (If there are any unknowable truths, the world is no longer rational and intelligible). So, what happens when someone’s position leads them to say all truths are knowable?

Well, it leads them to Fitch’s Knowability Paradox. From the Wiki blurb:

“If all truths were knowable, it would follow that all truths are in fact known.”

I wont outline this here. Anyone interested will have to read up on this for themselves. But, were I to debate Watkins as a presuppositionalist, I’d present this for his consideration.

Either he’ll have to give up the proposition that all truth is knowable (that is: give up his metaphysic that “the world itself is rational”), or he’ll have to accept some sort of absolute mind (that would mean he’d no longer be an atheist!), or he’ll have to defeat Fitch’s paradox.

Good luck with those options, Watkins.

It’d be easier to put my friend’s chonky boi on a diet…