God exists.

I'm not 100% sure what my opponent is arguing, but his argument appears to include, at least, the following elements. 1. We should do whatever minimizes pain. 2. We have the concept of an "ideal person" who is omnipotent, omniscient, and all good (in a specific sense). 3. Believing that the "ideal person" is real minimizes pain. From these premises and some others, my opponent seems to conclude that we should believe in the ideal person's actual existence. I'm not necessarily claiming that this construal includes everything my opponent has said, but I don't think he has made any arguments that would survive if 1-3 were refuted. First of all, this clearly isn't an argument for the actual existence of an ideal person, it is an argument for believing in the existence of an ideal person. My opponent has not presented any evidence indicating that the concept we allegedly have of an ideal person corresponds to reality, however reassuring it may be to believe in it. Having noted that, I will now address 1-3. Premise 1 is called "negative utilitarianism" in philosophy - the view that the good action is whatever action leads to the minimization of suffering. This is subject to a very powerful objection: If we wiped out all life on earth with nuclear weapons, suffering would be minimized. However, this is clearly not the best course of action, so negative utilitarianism must be wrong. There also appears to be an element ofpragmatism in my opponent's use of premise 1, because he says that the truth is whatever minimizes suffering. However, this theory implies that if one claim minimizes suffering in a given time and place, and a claim that contradicts it minimizes suffering at a different time and place, both mutually exclusive claims would be true. This violates the law of non-contradiction. Truth is the correspondence of a claim to reality. When I claim that my dog is black, that claim is true because it corresponds to the fact that my dog is black, not because it "minimizes suffering" for me to believe it. Premise 2 asserts that we have the concept of an ideal person who is omniscient, omnipotent, and all good in specific senses of those terms that my opponent has picked out having to do with minimizing pain. However, the senses of these terms that he has chosen are not what the terms mean. Omniscience and omnipotence have nothing to do with minimizing pain; they are, respectively, the property of having all knowledge and the property of being able to do anything. Further, being all good only consists in minimizing pain if we assume that negative utilitarianism is true, which it is not. Premise 3 is asserted somewhat arbitrarily. What is the actual evidence that it minimizes pain for people to believe that there is a person who always says what minimizes pain, has as much control over pain as possible, and minimizes pain as much as they can? My opponent has not really provided any. Regardless, it is easy to argue that there is no ideal person as my opponent conceives of it. If there is an ideal person, then there is a person with as much control over pain as possible and who always minimizes suffering as much as they can. If that's the case, there should be no pain. But there is. Therefore, there is no ideal person.