Are you moral?

The Washington Post had a nice little article last week, they posed a question,

Q: Is there good without God? Can people be good without God? How can people be good, in the moral and ethical sense, without being grounded in some sort of belief in a being which is greater than they are? Where do concepts such as good and evil, right and wrong, come from if not from religion? From where do you get your sense of good and evil, right and wrong?

I agree with Paula Kirby, the author of the article, who says "My sense of right and wrong comes from exactly the same source as yours: parental upbringing, society's norms, an evolved empathy with others.", this view concurs with the mainstream evidence on the subject.

Almost all societies, regardless of religious leaning conform to the 20% rule, i.e. one out of every five people will break their societies moral rules somehow, four of them won't (except in extreme circumstances like famine or war etc.) This strongly suggests that morality comes from Humans themselves and hence our evolutionary heritage and not any specific religion or culture. This makes perfect sense if you think about it and is confirmed through studies of other higher mammal species like Chimpanzees and Bonobo's who also live in social groups like us and show similar traits of altruism and an aversion to seeing other members of their species suffer. I suppose once you evolve self awareness and can put yourself into the shoes of another, some of these other moral behaviours follow shortly behind.

Humans (in our current form) have been around for roughly 200,000 years, Judaism emerged roughly 4,000 years ago, and the other main religions even more recently; how is it possible that we managed to survive for 196,000 years without Yahweh to tell us that murder and theft are incompatible with a cohesive society?

The answer of course is that we don't need a Deity to be moral, what we don't learn from our parents and our peers is simply innate.