Being good without god

[genkaus]

Something can have an inherent quality that is also contingent.

Contingent upon?

Inherent describes how a quality persists as an essential part of something in space and time.

Not an accurate definition. Not everything is spatio-temporally bound.

Contingent means that without that quality the thing could not exist at all.

Tautologically true, but essentially meaningless. Saying that a thing wouldn't be what it is without a particular quality does not make it contingent upon that property.

From my pespective, rationality can be identified as something separate from material being, just as mathematics can deal with formal properties not physically manifest, or just as we can discuss the form of a thing apart from its substance. But this debate is centuries old going all the way back to Plato and Aristotle, is it not?

That is the core of our every debate, isn't it? You see that concepts like rationality, mathematics, form etc. can be considered and discussed as apart from their physical counterparts and assume that they are in a distinct category of their own. Then you take it to mean that this category would also exist independently from the material and then go on to argue that thus it would be basic to the material and it is the physical that derives its existence from it.

The mistake is that you do not try to understand how these categories came about. How they are developed slowly and painstakingly through conscious observation of the material and therefore are dependent upon it.