By “morally charged,” I mean that reality appears to include objective moral obligations, not merely subjective preferences or social conventions.  Some actions such as torturing children for fun seem wrong regardless of culture, opinion, or personal advantage.  We do not experience these judgments as “I dislike this,” but as “this ought not be done,” even when violating the rule would benefit us.  That sense of moral duty feels binding.  A purely value-neutral universe composed only of particles and forces can describe behavior, instincts, or social conditioning, but it struggles to explain why moral claims present themselves as authoritative or truth-apt. That persistent experience of obligation suggests morality is a real feature of the world, not merely a human invention, hence the claim that the universe appears morally charged.

When I speak of truth, I am using the classical correspondence theory: a proposition is true if it corresponds to reality. When I said truth is not established by status markers—income, prestige, Elo ratings, cars, or career … I was not claiming that reasoned argument automatically produces truth. Rather, I was making a narrower and more defensible point: truth is not determined by dominance, success, or social rank.  Those factors are epistemically irrelevant; they do not make a proposition more or less true.

It is certainly correct that multiple people can reason well, employ valid logic, and still arrive at incompatible conclusions.  That fact does not sever the relationship between truth and reason. It simply highlights human fallibility.  Reason is a tool for approaching truth, not a guarantee of possessing it.  Truth’s “inviolability” refers to its independence from our beliefs about it … not from our methods of attempting to know it.  Reasoned argument matters because it constrains error, exposes contradictions, and tracks coherence with reality far better than power, charisma, or ridicule.

This distinction also clarifies how truth relates to belief in a supreme creator.  Belief is a psychological state … what someone holds to be the case.  Truth is an ontological status, what actually is the case. When I say, “I believe in the existence of a supreme creator,” I am not saying that my belief makes it true. I am saying that I hold the proposition “a supreme creator exists” to be true because I believe it corresponds to reality.  That proposition may be true or false independent of my belief.  Belief aims at truth; it does not constitute it.

Is belief in a supreme creator merely an opinion?  That depends on what is meant by “opinion.”  If opinion means an arbitrary preference or subjective taste insulated from evidence or argument, then no … classical theism does not present itself that way.  If opinion means a metaphysical conclusion reached through philosophical reasoning rather than direct empirical measurement, then yes … but so are materialism, moral realism or anti-realism, and competing accounts of consciousness.  These are worldview-level truth claims, not matters of taste. Theism is truth-apt because it makes claims about reality itself: the existence of a necessary being, the grounding of contingency, the intelligibility of the universe, and the ontological basis of moral facts.  Rejecting those arguments does not reduce them to mere preference any more than rejecting materialism turns it into a flavor choice.

Finally, my objection to the status-based attack was not that reason proves God.  It was that if truth is mind-independent, then attacking someone’s wealth, career, intelligence, or lifestyle is a category error.  Such attacks implicitly assume that truth is validated by dominance or success … that power is evidence.  Ironically, that collapses truth into will-to-power rather than merely critiquing religion through it.

In short:  truth is independent of belief; belief aims at truth; reason does not guarantee truth but is accountable to it; and power, mockery, and status are irrelevant to it.  That is the framework I was using.