God exists.

I'm still not 100% sure what my opponent is arguing, since I've never come across a concept of God like this before. My approach will be to address specific things my opponent's argument clearly seems to depend on rather than give an integrated overall critique, at least until I am more confident that I know what is going on.Preliminary RequestsPreliminarily, I will request that my opponent do two things in his next post: (a) Please present your overall argument as a syllogism with numbered premises and conclusion. If your argument is inductive with multiple lines of evidence, then please provide a numbered summary of the lines of evidence you are presenting for the existence of God.(b) Please provide a definition of God that does not rely on any unconventional definitions of terms like "omniscience," "omnipotence," "knowledge," etc. I have enough familiarity with philosophy of religion to know that these concepts are either never or almost never defined in terms of minimizing suffering, and your unusual definitions make your posts unnecessarily confusing. (A definition is a single sentence stating the essence of the term defined in terms of genus and differentia, like "man is the rational animal.")Regarding My Opponent's ArgumentMy opponent asserts the following ethical claims:1. We should do whatever minimizes pain.2. Believing that God is real minimizes pain.He also clearly seems to assert the following theological claims:3. God literally exists in our minds.4. We are all subconsciously aware of the existence of an omnipotent, omnipresent, all good person.5. Omniscience and omnipotence are necessarily connected to minimizing pain.In addition, he makes the following epistemological claims:6. The truth is whatever minimizes pain the most.7. We cannot interact with objective reality whatsoever.To summarize, my opponent appears to be presenting a utilitarian ethics, some sort of subjectivist theology, and a subjectivist or skeptical epistemology. He is welcome to correct my understanding of his positions if I am misunderstanding him.I'll address each of these categories in turn.EthicsMy opponent's central position in ethics is negative utilitarianism, as I said previously. He denies this, but his position is based on minimizing suffering rather than attaining pleasure or happiness, so it must be a form of negative utilitarianism. He has not really refuted my objection to this position based on wiping out all life with nuclear weapons; all he has done is make an ad hoc distinction between minimizing and extinguishing suffering. But extinguishing suffering is minimizing it by definition - "zero" is as minimized as suffering can possibly get.The only defense of the utility of believing in God that my opponent gives is that Western, Judeo-Christian countries are more prosperous and advanced than anywhere else in the world. But this is not due to Christianity, which existed throughout the Middle Ages without leading to any such progress. It is due to the movement away from the values of Christianity and toward a secular worldview that values empirical evidence rather than faith, and the rights of the individual rather than the divine right of kings that was taken for granted in practically all previous societies (with a handful of exceptions like ancient Athens). If anything, the Middle East is less advanced than we are precisely because they take their religious beliefs so seriously.For example, my opponent mentions the scientific advances the West has made. How many of those advances were due to prayer instead of empirical evidence? None, of course.TheologyMy opponent's theology appears to be based largely on the claim that everyone subconsciously believes in God. Of course, he is forced to claim that this is a subconscious idea, because it is obvious that plenty of people don't consciously believe in God. However, the claim that we all accept this idea subconsciously has little plausibility and is not based on any observational evidence.Omniscience has nothing to do with minimizing pain because almost no one in the history of philosophy has defined knowledge in terms of minimizing pain. The Medieval Scholastics viewed knowledge as the "adequatio intellectus ad rem," the adjustment of our minds to the object - and no, they didn't mean anything to do with minimizing suffering when they said "adjustment." Contemporary philosophers usually think of knowledge as some variant on justified true belief, which again is rarely or never conceived of in terms of minimizing suffering. So, my opponent's definition of omniscience simply is not what has ever been meant by the concept.Omnipotence doesn't mean power to control suffering, it means the ability to perform miracles and so on. There is nothing in our subconscious that can do that.EpistemologyMy opponent holds that we have no cognitive access to objective reality, which he thinks is established by the theory of evolution. But how does he know that the theory of evolution is true if we have no cognitive access to objective reality? This argument's conclusion contradicts its premise ("there is no objective knowledge - except this enormous mass of scientific data over here"). Moreover, it is really just speculative evolutionary psychology at best. We don't know enough about how our ability to perceive and reason about the world evolved to make sweeping claims like this.An example of a case where the claim that the truth is what minimizes suffering leads to a contradiction would be any case where two people are enemies. It minimizes suffering for each of them to believe that they are a good and successful person and that their enemy is an evil and unsuccessful person, because those beliefs are what they take pleasure in. My opponent's theory of truth is nothing but a recipe for self delusion on any issue you have an emotional attachment to.