(May 12, 2016 at 6:59 pm)bennyboy Wrote: It's a different kind of idealism than I've talked about in the past. In this post, I'm talking about ideas as formative principles, without reference to any conscious entity....tbh I'm not even arguing against materialism, except to say this: that formal principles clearly precede materialism, and that the way that matter in a chaotic system organizes itself is better seen as an expression of those principles, than to say that the organization is a happenstance of material properties.
Your position appears to most closely match that of Aristotle solution to the problem of universals, i.e. Forms are real and causally efficacious but they cannot be alienated from a material substrate. Contrast this with Plato's earlier notion that Form, or Ideas, are alienable and could be said to exist in some manner without actually manifesting on some way. As for me I advocate the type of moderate realism developed later by the Scholastic Doctors. At the very least the Scholastic solution requires some kind of universal Mind, though not necessarily having a one-to-one relationship with the Christian notion of the Divine, although it's really just a hop, skip and a jump logically. :-)
I think you will find that 99% of AF members advocate either nominalism or conceptualism. This is not a uniquely atheistic position. Both Anslem and William of Occam were nominalists. However, I do believe that while a nominalist need not be a theist, a logically consistent atheist must be either a nominalist or a conceptualist. Most likely this would not be the case with a deist, so your concerns about having to worship some entity are not a concern.
