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Evil is unreal

From the October 1983 issue of The Christian Science Journal


One of the most profound discoveries of Mary Baker Eddy, the Founder of Christian Science, is the unreality of evil. As the power, presence, and reality—the allness—of God, good, became more and more obvious to her, she saw that any opposite to God is an impossibility. The infinite can have no opposite. The belief in evil was uncovered as an illusion, a product of the human mind. She saw that to demonstrate the allness of God one must understand the unreality of evil.

People have struggled with the problem of evil since the beginning of time. Where did evil come from? That's the perennial question. But the question assumes that evil is real and must therefore have a cause. The assumption is wrong. Where does a mistake come from? It has no legitimate cause. Where does an error in addition or subtraction come from? It has no valid source, for it doesn't exist in the science of mathematics.

But vastly more than human reasoning is necessary to prove the unreality of evil and the power and reality of good. Evil and suffering seem confirmed by the physical senses. How does one see beyond the appearance and get at the fact of spiritual perfection? It takes spiritual understanding to overturn the evidence of the physical senses. One must be able to see through the false presentation even as one sees beyond the mistake in mathematics when he understands the laws involved.

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