Article October 29, 1979 Issue

Exposing error's nihility

WILLIAM S. WARREN

Nothing is just that—nothing. It's nothing at all—no thing, no person, no disease, no situation. Not something to be ignored as nothing but nothing to be actually seen as nothing. Unreal. Pure nil.

It's one thing, of course, to say glibly or even vehemently that evil is nothing. It's a far different thing to understand evil's nothingness. To do so requires the perception that nothing is nothing because something is all. This all something is God, if we are to take His own Word for it. He told Moses, "I AM THAT I AM"^{Ex. 3:14;}—there's nothing else. And God also spelled out His allness with the first commandment. Prophets and apostles, and above all Christ Jesus, held God to be omnipotent and infinite—qualities leaving room for nothing else—and Christian Science does too.

"God's law is in three words, 'I am All,' " Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, writes; "and this perfect law is ever present to rebuke any claim of another law."^{No and Yes, p. 30;} On this God-is-All basis, Christian Science labels that which is ungodlike as nothing, the opposite of All. Matter thus qualifies as nothing, being utterly unspiritual, ungodlike. And disease also qualifies as nothing, because All is God, good.