Refutation of Dualism 

  The Good (or goodness) as attributed to any reality, substance or action, only makes sense as distinguished from preferences. Goodness means what you ought to prefer irrespective of what you happen to prefer – and would prefer if your whole heart and mind were in tune with reality. And what you ought to prefer doesn’t make sense apart from what love commands. What ought I to do as a father or a teacher, in the end, reduces to what is truly good for my children or students, what is really in their best interests – which is a translation of what it means to love them (in a Christian sense anyway).

  The problem is my limited understanding. The problem is aligning my will with what my mind and heart understand. What love commands doesn’t make sense apart from reality – apart from the deepest reality of what you are dealing with (often present in potential only; think of a mother’s love for her son, a murderer). To will a person’s good is just to will what a perfect love (with a perfect understanding of them) would will. That is the standard written into the nature of things. Good is in right relation to this standard; evil is the opposite.

    I have been attracted to Gnostic mythology in the past; to the idea that there are two equal powers contending: Good and Evil, God and the Devil, Spirit and Matter. It seemed to explain my own alienation from my bodily (especially sexual) desires. It seemed to explain the inherent non-being of anything material: coming into being just to decay and die - not an accidental but an essential feature of material beings. Mind, spirit, Ideas were eternal, and this real. Materials beings were never fully present, always changing, dying from the moment they - we - come into being. To exist in time is to be less than real, less than good. Our being is infected from birth with nothingness. A radical dualism between spirit and matter made sense of this to me. 

   In the moral-religious myth, Dualism as the Idea that Satan is the opposite of God, rather than the Archangel Michael, as in Christianity (C. S. Lewis).  

   If dualism were true - metaphysical and religious - we should weep when our children are born. 

   Dualism is incoherent for the following reason:  the very concept of good and evil implies that one is in a right relationship with an ultimate standard and the other is not; that one is in tune with metaphysical reality and the other is not. Therefore, they cannot be equal powers. One can only be a corruption or negation of the other. There could in principle be a dualism of radically different substances: spirit and matter (cf. physics: energy and matter are one). But not Good and Evil. 

   

  This is an ancient insight, in no way original to me. I tried to put it into my words.