I think it is a level subtler than that. Value is downstream from utility - we consider something good because it is good for something. Most values are instrumental. Terminal values are a bit hanging in the air. The theist solution is to call terminal values simply instrumental values for god's purposes and call it a day. I.e. humans practically being gods property or tools. That way all values are instrumental, all goods are good for somethings and it is coherent.

The interesting part here is that if feels seductively intelligent. After all most people just consider those things values they feel remotely good about. To see most values as instrumental - for example, to see democracy as not simply something to cheer for, but a tool with advantages and disadvantages - is much more intelligent approach. To be able to tie down every value as instrumental, just some of them are not human instruments, feels super logical. It is a textbook case of "feeling rational" and this is part of why I used to be tempted towards theism in the past, as it makes everything make sense. "We have the UN in order to not have thermonuclear war! We want to avoid thermonuclear war so that we are not extinct! Why shouln't we be extinct? It would be the end of all problems and suffering... but maybe god has plans with us and he is our rightful owner! So let's support the UN!" You can see how elegant and tied-down it is.

The proper atheist solution is nowhere that elegant. I can only argue from a Heideggerian "we are thrown in the world and must cope". We are the accidents of evolution thrown in a world that is an accident of the big bang or quantum many-worlds. We cope however we can. Part of that coping is calling those values that are most likely to make life bearable for most terminal values. It is not elegant at all, and I can understand why it is less attractive than theism. But it is more probably true.

Robertson's point is actually quite relevant for religious folk. When I was still a serious Christian, I too wondered how a purely secular approach to morality could avoid degenerating into relativism or a "might makes right" free-for-all.

Any arbitrariness in one's approach to morality risks relativism, as someone else can take a different approach and so reach a different conclusion. For example, utilitarianism becomes a much different beast if I introduce a caste system wherein I take a weighted sum of people's utilities. I may decide that one group's happiness is worth more than that of a different group.

Cheating is another issue that bothered me. If you can lie, cheat, steal, and kill your way to a good life and avoid all the negative consequences, then why not do it? This is the perspective of someone who does not value other people's happiness and only follows the rules because of the punishments for breaking them.

Contrast with a supreme judge. He's the source of morality, so there's no relativism. He's omniscient, so there's no getting away with doing something in secret. He's almighty, so there's no way to use one's might to avoid consequences. Is it any wonder that the devout can feel underwhelmed by secular morality? They can accept that atheists can be just and honorable, and that some are more righteous than most religious folk. What they have trouble accepting is that those moral precepts have a solid foundation without God.

Is Melkor explicitly described as unredeemable?

As I recall, Eru's creation is incomplete, and we cannot know all the outcomes.

This year's receiver of the Carl Sagan Award was a Jesuit Brother. I find it very funny, although I don't know if I should.

From what I understand .there are a lot of established and respectable scientists who are theists. Anyone could go on a treasure hunt for more, but it doesn't prove anything. It's just a numbers game.

Helping make more accurate predictions about the future by reducing the “X isn’t allowed to happen” effect (or, as Anna Salamon once put it, “putting X into the realm of the thinkable”).

This point, along with your larger module here, is something, I promote often and has helped me and my friends immensely! Just last night, a distressed friend called me and was having a panic attack about a guest-speaker he had invited to his college campus. He was worried this guest-speaker was going to do something morally questionable at another person's expense publicly and that would reflect badly on him and his organization. The speaker did just such a thing a little over a week ago at an Ivy League, so his fear has a rational trigger. My task was to 1) reinforce to him that he is easily smart enough to deal with these challenges and 2) that in the unlikely event of the worst happening he should be prepared. Eventually we got to imagining the worse case scenario, and he came up with a few precautions and fail-safes to protect himself and others.

I am very proud of him. Moral of the story: don't shut down, don't pigeon-hole yourself, think about what is within your power and what is not, prepare your mind and your world for the coming turbulence.

There were other gods than Sauron (and Morgoth before him). The Maiar and Valar could probably have un-corrupted them, if they had deigned to bother to try instead of just accepting the gradual decline of the Good in Middle Earth. Maybe when the last of the elves got to Valinor they could have persuaded them to do so.

Taking god out of it leaves a lot of former linkages dangling in the air

There's a nice exposition of roughly this idea over at Yvain's / Scott Alexander's blog.

I think Pascal's Wager and the God-Shaped Hole should get more play.

To your Pascal's Wager statement

Perhaps God values intellectual integrity so highly that He is prepared to reward honest atheists, but will punish anyone who practices a religion he does not truly believe simply for personal gain.

I don't think what you say is incommensurable with the Catholic position that what is most important to the Omega is that we pursue the best thing we know i.e. intellectual integrity along with charity. But perhaps I am wrong. You might know more about this than I do.

If God is Truth, then wouldn't it follow that rationality fills (or at least could fill) that God-shaped hole? This brings me to the second point you made.

I have never heard a Christian say there is a God-shaped whole inside me. But if there is it would be universe-sized! But I suppose I can be more generous with my interpretation. Christianity has a technical vocabulary too, but this isn't it. The theological way to say it would be something like, "A good life for a human being includes worship of God who is personal and just." That's simply what I imagine a serious Christian would say, right?

You said:

Omega comes along and tells you that sorry, the hole is exactly God-shaped, and anyone without a religion will lead a less-than-optimally-happy life.

What do you mean by happy? What would Omega mean by a "less than happy life?" The truth or doing something that you must do by virtue of knowing the truth will not always make you happy. Perhaps you don't feel like defending the truth today. A blissful life could be spent shopping in malls or donating to African countries or picking up litter. How are the types of happiness achieved in each act different? Or are they?

I went down the rabbit hole of researching the question "what is truth?" soon after I joined LW almost 3 years ago, and ended up with a rather unpopular anti-Platonic ontology of the term "truth" being worse than useless in most cases. The correspondence theory of truth stopped making sense to me because there is nothing for it to correspond to. So, it's somewhat more radical than William James's pragmatic theory of truth. But I guess this is probably not what you are interested in.

Your optimism is heroic. I also don't think we should accept that the rest of humanity are morons, going to hell in a hand-basket. I subscribe to a bit from Cormac McCarthy's No Country For Old Men, "I think the truth is always simple. It has pretty much got to be. It needs to be simple enough for a child to understand. Otherwise it'd be too late. By the time you figured it out it would be too late." I also think the main fundamentals of reality have to be like that. If they weren't we'd just have to despair over our fellow man.

Your understanding about academic philosophy is right on the mark; the coherence camp would not accept that a sentence can refer to mind-independent facts about the world. And Cormac's character Sheriff Ed Tom Bell has something to say about that too:

The stories gets passed on and the truth gets passed over. As the sayin goes. Which I reckon some would take as meanin that the truth cant compete. But I dont believe that. I think that when the lies are all told and forgot the truth will be there yet. It dont move about from place to place and it dont change from time to time. You cant corrupt it any more than you can salt salt. You cant corrupt it because that's what it is. It's the thing you're talkin about. I've heard it compared to the rock — maybe in the bible—and I wouldnt disagree with that. But it'll be here even when the rock is gone. I'm sure they's people would disagree with that. Quite a few, in fact. But I never could find out what any of them did believe.

I think one the most important propositions that is too often ignored in today's society is that reality is knowable, that discussion can be rational and not emotional, that opinions can be informed rather than uninformed, that arguments can be passionate without being belligerent, and that discomfort is a small price to pay for a little more truth in our lives.

Basically, if people don't believe in heartily defending the truth, then they are only ever paying lip service to the correspondence theory.