Gary talks about the film, Galaxy Quest, and the idea of borrowed capital.
If religious skeptics have forsaken biblical presuppositions, why is it that they can think rationally, work in terms of the scientific method, and require some semblance of morality? The answer is simple. Unbelievers are philosophically schizophrenic. They don’t often live consistently with the governing principles of their materialistic worldview. For example, “The success of modern science has been due to its ‘borrowed capital,’ because modern science is like the prodigal son. He left his father’s house and is rich, but the substance he expends is his father’s wealth.”[2]
Those who deny God and assert that the world and all of its studied connections came into being randomly have no way to account for the uniformity of the laws of nature, specifically creation. “[N]atural man does have knowledge, but it is borrowed knowledge, stolen from the Christian-theistic pasture or range, yet natural man has no knowledge, because in terms of his principle the ultimacy of his thinking, he can have none, and the knowledge he possesses is not truly his own. . . . The natural man has valid knowledge only as a thief possesses goods.”[3]
Anti-Christian worldviews are held together by Band-Aids stolen from the Christian worldview medicine cabinet. The Bible tells us that in Christ all things are held together (Heb. 1:3). The skeptic cannot account for the necessary cohesion of the world from within his system. If left to itself, the man-centered worldview of modern skepticism, like the occupants of over-turned war machines of Wells’ War of the Worlds, falls ill by an irrational and amoral virus of self-destruction.
The Impossibility of the Contrary
Atheists are materialists. The only things that matter consist of matter. There is the initial problem of accounting for the origin of matter and how it self-organized to produce the mind. How does the materialist account for the non-physical information necessary to animate unconscious matter to become conscious beings? The mind is not material.
Buy NowGary talks about the film, Galaxy Quest, and the idea of borrowed capital. Just like the aliens in the film, atheists and humanists try to build a world on what they appreciate from what they see in Christianity, without having any basis for it in their own philosophical worldview.
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[2] Rousas J. Rushdoony, The Mythology of Science (Nutley, NJ: Craig Press, 1967), 87.
[3] Rousas J. Rushdoony, By What Standard?: An Analysis of the Philosophy of Cornelius Van Til (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1958), 24.