That statement seems obvious enough but it is the firm position of many. An atheist, a woman on an internet Q and A site, informed me that she was much happier now that she was an atheist. She said her guilt over her sexual activities was now gone since there was no guilt from church doctrine bearing down on her and she was enjoying her sexual freedom, She believed reality had changed because she changed her mind, when in fact, only her behavior has changed.
If we apply this principle to ordinary life – the one that says you can change reality by changing your opinion – we find ourselves in the absurd.
For example, let’s say I believe that it is not raining outside. It actually is raining, but never mind, I believe otherwise. I leave my house with no raincoat or umbrella, and I get soaked but still, my opinion is that it is not raining. We call such people psycho and for good reason.
It must be obvious that reality is not what we say, want or think. Reality has an immediacy which we cannot get around. If I die in the rain, it is still raining even though I am not there to deny it.
What is the problem here? That people can say that because they believe in no God they can therefore change reality?
The problem is the assumption that there are no absolutes, something taught by relativists and materialists. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The universe is a macrocosm of absolutes. Take for example the space ship program, Voyagers One and Two.
In August 2012, Voyager 1 made the historic entry into interstellar space, the region between stars, filled with material ejected by the death of nearby stars millions of years ago. Voyager 2 launched on August 20, 1977, from Cape Canaveral, Florida aboard a Titan-Centaur rocket.
Provided there are no major systems malfunctions and no collisions with other space bodies, Voyager 2 is expected to continue transmitting data back to Earth until at least 2025 – over 48 years after its launch and well after it exits the solar system and enters interstellar space.
If there were no absolutes scientists could not have possibly programmed these space probes to do anything but wander aimlessly around the sky. As it is, as long as they are transmitting data we can know they have done exactly to the millimeter what they were told to do.
The same rules apply to our tiny universe down here on earth. There are absolutes in science (the sun rises promptly every day), but also to human beings. And since there is a God His absolutes apply to us all whether we believe it or not.
This woman believe she is not rid of her guilt. Guilt is not a problem; guilt is the emotional equivalent to pain – it tells us there is something wrong on the inside. We immediately handle our pain. My daughter had a terrible headache and drove herself to the hospital. Her brain tumor was so serious they moved her to another hospital by ambulance. Her pain told her something was wrong in her head.
Guilt is the same pain which tells us to seek change in our lives – there is a problem in our souls. Guilt is His blessing to us to inform us that we are in trouble. No individual opinion of one person out of 7 billion can change that no matter how hard one might try.