Evil is not a thing – it is the absence of good. When new agers favor a view of the world as merely being a ‘simulation,’ they argue for the view that nothing is real, nothing really matters, and everything is changeable. Since they are endorsing a world without actual substance, a world of ‘nothingness,’ they are endorsing a world of “evil,” of “absence.”
Several months ago, I watched a movie about how Hollywood moguls sexually abuse children, called “An Open Secret.” In one scene of the movie, a brave child audio recorded his abuser verbally trying to rationalize the evil he wanted to do to. I will never forget how familiar his rationalization sounded – it reminded me of what I had heard in my college classrooms – essentially: “It’s OK. Humans are just animals. It doesn’t matter who we have sex with. It doesn’t matter. Men can have sex with men, men can have sex with children or women – it doesn’t matter. Animals in the wild have sex with whatever, it doesn’t matter, etc., etc.” Again, a theory of nothingness - that nothing really matters.
In college, I was enamored by professors who endorsed evolutionary psychology, namely the theory that all human behavior has an evolutionary origin, and it is the job of scientists to parse this out. However, as I embraced this worldview, I found myself becoming a more amoral and stoic person because, hey, it didn’t really matter how I treated others. Nothing really mattered. I could later blame everything on evolution – an amoral, accidental force. It would be similar to blaming one’s behavior on an abyss that no one really understands. I later learned that this strain of thought is in the same family as those, which led to slavery and eugenics, but that is a story for another day.
Nothingness is not good. Nothingness is the absence of good: truth, order - God, who is the fulfillment of truth and order. I lament seeing good people fall into this simulation myth honey trap. Any world view that embraces nothingness ultimately embraces evil.