Last week, I heard part of a debate between an atheist and a professor at a Christian school of divinity on this question:  can we be good without God?  Although this is an ancient question, it nonetheless takes us to the heart of what is means to be alive and human:  how do we know what is right and wrong?
     The issue is not what is good and bad.  The real issue is, why do we think in moral terms?  Why do we instinctively imagine a world in which right and wrong exist?  How have we flesh and blood beings developed a immaterial moral sense?  Why would we suppose to do so?  Saying that we deemed it necessary to do so begs the question:  why, in the absence, of a moral sense, would we ever have considered it appropriate?  That's putting the cart before the horse; it does not answer the question.
     Theism of course says that our moral sense, being immaterial, could only have come from God.  But why were Adam and Eve, the first humans, to have it?  What was it about them that such a thing became possible?  Weren't they as flesh and blood as you and me?
     A non-theistic argument would say in reply that it was that very flesh and blood nature that enabled the rise of a moral sense.  It was inevitable and necessary for human survival, essential for the development of the species.  But who decided that?
     It's difficult to dismiss the importance of a moral sense.  Yet as I said earlier, it's also difficult to see how beings who did not have one thought it necessary to possess one.  Can genetic mutation and variation really produce morality?
     Although we should not use God to fill in the blanks, we can surely acknowledge that what is personal, that is, the moral sense, could never arise from what is, personally speaking, dead.  Perhaps how is not nearly important as why.
     It's hard to be moral without determining why we are.