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be no need for Luke’s courageous and selfless actions to save his friend Han Solo if it weren’t for Jabba the Hutt’s greed and inordinate desire for revenge. Nor would Luke have displayed the kind of compassion implicit in his refusal to kill his own father if Darth Vader hadn’t been seduced by the Dark Side of the Force. There would be no cause for the kind of heroism displayed by the likes of Princess Leia, Han Solo, and Lando Calrissian if there were no evil Empires to rebel against. It may be that the Dark Side serves a good and necessary purpose: there would be no genuine goodness in the universe without the Dark Side as an impetus for noble action. A universe without villainy—and therefore without heroism—would be morally lifeless, inert.

We know evil existed a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away. But has evil always existed? If evil came into existence at some point in history, what was its cause? It couldn’t come from what’s truly good, for if goodness gives rise to evil then it wouldn’t really be good in the first place. It makes more sense to say that, like goodness, evil is simply a basic feature of the universe and has no cause—it has always existed along with goodness. Western philosophy offers this kind of dualistic account of good and evil in both non-religious and religious forms.

The ancient Greek philosopher Plato articulates perhaps the most influential non-religious expression of a dualism of good and evil. He argues that the existence of a world such as ours—a world that on the whole is quite harmonious and orderly—must have a maker, a divine craftsman, and a plan that’s followed in constructing the universe.51 However, any construction project requires more than simply a design and a builder. It also requires raw materials. For Plato, matter is the ultimate raw material of the divine craftsman’s building project that is our universe, much as life forms the basis for the existence of the Force in the Star Wars galaxy.

Yoda didn’t create the raw materials from which his hut on Dagobah was constructed; the tree, sticks, and mud that he used to build his home pre-existed the finished product. Plato thinks the divine craftsman, as powerful and perfect as he is, works under the same basic restrictions. Although there hasn’t always been a visible universe with planets, living things, and machines in existence, matter, the “stuff” out of which all of these particular things are made, has always been around.

The fact that matter is uncreated also explains why the world can’t be perfectly harmonious and orderly according to Plato. Even if the divine craftsman necessarily creates the best world he can, this doesn’t mean that such a world is an absolutely perfect world, since the divine craftsman must create the visible world out of matter, and the matter out of which the world is fashioned isn’t perfect but is by its nature impure, disordered, and discordant. Let’s assume that when Yoda did anything—even something as mundane as building a home out of sticks and mud—he did a great job. But even a home built by a Jedi Master is not completely impervious to decay at the hands of the forces of nature over time. Similarly, the visible world as a whole—with all of its evils—is the best that the divine craftsman could manage, given the limitations inherent in the raw material he’s got to work with.

The Platonic tradition in Western philosophy has often considered matter to be not just limiting, but positively evil. Since matter is inherently evil, so are the individual bodies composed of it. Platonists look with suspicion on activities associated with the body, such as eating and drinking for pleasure, as well as sexual activity. Our bodies distract us from the more worthy pursuits of thinking and doing morally virtuous deeds. As Plato, in the voice of Socrates, remarks, “So long as we have the body accompanying our reason in its inquiries, so long as our souls are befouled by this evil admixture, we shall assuredly never fully possess that which we desire, to wit truth.”52 In addition, we often identify ourselves