Theory number 3.

[Angrboda]

It's all anecdotal experience that is based on false reasoning that they don't recognize and will laugh at if they ever realize the reasoning they are employing.

Religions are not believed in a properly basic manner....

....But is belief in praise and morality similar? No. Be it true or the nihilist are right, it's not inferred. We are inclined to take it as a granted for sure thing from early as children.

Now I would say praise and morality plays in the lives of children and adults and all humans, and as such, it's belief is universal, even if we disagree on the details.

But I want you to honestly distinguish belief in praise that is properly basic, from belief in ultimate source of praise that is ultimately praiseworthy, and tell me why it's rational to believe in praise, but not rational to believe in ultimate source of praise.

As has been noted, the existence of an ultimately smelly thing is not necessary to establish smelliness.(**) (Dawkins, I believe.) The question to ask yourself is in what ways reasoning and rational thinking differs from moral judgements or praiseworthiness. Robert Burton in his book On Being Certain suggests the counter-intuitive notion that the differing (or seemingly different) modes of judging are actually unified by the same experiential mechanism or qualia, a thesis which has support in various quarters of psychology and neurology.

More fundamentally, if you cannot describe the nature of rational thinking, and how it is qualitatively different from moral thinking (or praise), then you are asserting that a difference that is not salient enough for you to describe it is evidence for something you can't detect. Or, unknown (difference) --> unknown (percept) --> unknown (thing/god). This chain of inference is highly problematic.

Anyway, I recommend that you read Burton; it will drive your thinking in new ways.


(**) Note that this is an artifact of smell having properties that are distributed, statistically, in reliable ways; perception of smelliness is perception of difference from a standard or mean (normal smell or absence of 'smelliness'), thus yielding two additional anchors for the "apparent" requirement for a transcendent source. Are you sure that these - praise and morals - are related, as difference from an ideal rather than difference from a mean, a mundane standard, or even a negative ideal (e.g. evil); note it is easier to identify that which is evil than what is good or virtuous.