Carleas
Well, the trick there is to remember that God is not 'one of us'. That is to say, part of the experience of value (I hope you agree) is that values are bigger than us. That is, if I decide a mountain or a baby or a painting is valuable, I am saying something more than "[i]I[/i] think it's cool". To the extent that we sense* value exists beyond people pointing it out, we need something beyond a person to account for this, which would be God. We may ask why God values this and not that, I suppose, but it does answer the question of values having a 'beyondness' in our experience- and we have no reason to believe that God has that experience of beyondness, so we don't have to account for it in Him.
Again, it comes to the issue of beyondness, which is not isomorphic at all. I may have phrased my opening post badly. If we sense that beauty is more than you and I stating that something is beautiful, we need a reference beyond ourselves, which is somehow still capable of registering beauty. The question of why God finds this or that to be beautiful would be something else.
Here I disagree pretty strongly- it is precisely that God is a Person capable of conceptualizing Beauty that makes the theistic response a good one, and different than saying the universe wants to be beautiful in itself.
The moral issue Re: God is a complicated and I hope I don’t have to get into it, it might derail your thread. But I will say this, it mirrors the above arguments. Many philosophers (and most regular people) have the sense that if everybody on earth decided that killing children for fun was morally right, it would not make the act right, rather it would just mean that everybody on earth was wrong. God explains very well how moral truths can overrule what anyone or everyone thinks about morals. It is that sense of morals overruling us that I mean when I say they are necessary.
I don’t think He created moral laws, exactly. Like I said, I think I can answer this kind of question very well, but it’s quite a detour.
*- You’ll see me referring to what we ‘sense’ quite often, as opposed to what is true. The reason is this- materialism can account for these senses, and further, it accounts for them by saying they are mistaken. A key point of my argument is that a system that justifies as many universal intuitions as possible is simpler and preferable to a system that we are all subject to many inescapable illusions.