God exists.

God--an omnipotent, omniscient, all good person--is real. He is omnipotent because He controls all there is to control. He is omniscient because He knows all that is to be known. He is all good because He seeks to minimize the pain of existence. I agree 100% that the default position is that X does not exist. I therefore accept the burden of proof and will lay out my reasoning below. But first, some groundwork. Please, bear with me. The fundamental reality of life is pain. This is because no one has ever argued against their own pain. People argue against happiness, meaning, or the merit of existence itself all the time. Yet not a single person is able to argue against their own pain. One's own pain is the only thing everybody agrees on. What does it mean to agree? Some people may argue verbally/ intellectually against the existence of pain, but they will not act out this belief. There is a difference between implicit/ instinctual knowledge and explicit/ articulated knowledge. Somebody may *think* he knows that pain isn't real, but his actions will show that he *knows* that pain is real on an implicit level. Actions speak louder than words. Our conscious thoughts can only articulate what we *think* we know. It is our subconscious which *actually* knows. What is knowledge? As I alluded to, it's twofold: 1) Implicit/ instinctual knowledge. Our subconscious. It sits in the most ancient parts of our brain. It governs our life on the highest level of analysis (survive, reproduce, love) as well as on the very lowest (punch, laugh, type.) It contains our muscle memory and our "genetic memory" (archetypes, dreams, instincts.) 2) Explicit/ articulated knowledge. The thoughts that enter and exit our consciousness. Our faculty for reason. It sits in the youngest parts of our brain. It governs our life on the intermediate levels of analysis (figuring out how to survive, learning how to punch.) It contains our explicit memory which is an amalgamation of information we've managed to acquire. What is information? A piece of information is a number of random "things" which have been picked up by our sensory organs, enter into our subconscious, emerge as thoughts in our conscious and get put *in formation.* Our faculty for seeking and searching for information has developed out of our ancestors' faculty for seeking and searching for food. In fact, when we look for and acquire information, the same parts of our brain light up as when we look for and acquire food. Information is the knowledge of food. Not only that, it is the knowledge of the concept of food. A dog knows that when A happens (A=rattling of his bowl, OR smell of food, OR he's in a pack and there's a deer etc.), there will be food. But only humans know that when A happens AND THEN B happens AND THEN C happens AND THEN ... Z happens, there will be food. Information on how herds move, or on how to plant seeds, does not lead to food right now, but it might in a few months. Information, or: the knowledge of food now or in the future, is thus binary: There either is food (i.e. the kind and the amount that would sustain you and would thus be labeled by your brain as "food"), or there isn't. Your hunger is either quenched sufficiently, or it isn't. You either survive, or you die. 1 or 0. This is the ability, but also the limitation, of our human brain. We do not and cannot know anything beyond this concept. So what exactly is information for? What is the conscious mind for? It's a tool like any other. A tool the subconscious uses to fulfill the purpose of life. It's the good old "Is vs. Ought"-dichotomy. Whether you think it *ought* to or not, that's what the subconscious just plainly does. Including yours. There's no escaping it. What is the purpose of life, then? In any meaningful sense, it's to minimize pain. Pain, almost by definition, is the thing to be avoided. If there's nothing in you that wants to avoid the thing, it's not pain. If there's something in you that does want to avoid the thing, it causes pain. *It is pain.* What is the antidote to pain? The truth. What is the truth? The truth is whatever minimizes pain. We actually have no more accurate or useful definition than this. Interpersonal communication, i.e. the exchange of articulated knowledge, is not based on making objective statements. Instead, it is based on stressing pieces of information. When at least two human beings do this, and do it in a manner that's conducive to minimizing pain, the truth emerges out of their exchange. For example, if you shout "You're fat!" at someone because they're, well, fat, you're not exactly telling the truth. The thought you put inside their conscious is not "Am obese, must take action to lose weight and reduce suffering." Instead, what you've communicated and put inside their conscious is something like "I'm ugly, I'm undesirable, I'm hopeless, this person resents me, this person is an enemy towards me, other people like him are enemies towards me, I should despair" etc. The contrast between the two is apparent. Further, it's apparent which is the truth, but also how difficult it is to communicate, or "create," truth. The specifications of an airplane are something like truth, because they successfully carry passengers and make them suffer less compared to different specifications that don't match the physical world as well. Telling someone they look good in a pair of jeans that they wear every day that you think is ugly is not the truth, because even though it will make them feel better for a short time, in the long run you've set them up for embarrassment and greater pain, or at the very least breed resentment from your dishonesty. On the other hand, telling someone they look good in the wedding dress that they're wearing only that day that you think is ugly actually communicates the truth *if* you stress it in a way that doesn't dwell on the dress itself but rather communicates "you are great, you should feel great, this is a special day." In conclusion: By speaking the truth as much as you can, you gain as much knowledge as possible. You move towards omniscience. Through knowledge you gain as much control over pain as possible (the only kind of control we know or want.) You move towards omnipotence. Through omnipotence, you become as good as possible. Now this may warrant a short explanation: He who controls his own pain controls his own malevolence. Malevolence, or evil, is a result of experiencing great pain and growing resentful about life itself. You yourself, as in your conscious self, cannot truly control your environment without controlling yourself. And you cannot control yourself without minimizing your pain. And, as a social animal, you cannot minimize your pain without minimizing the pain of others. And by definition, you cannot minimize the pain of others without becoming a better person. Therefore, control and benevolence go hand in hand. Now, finally, how should we define this all-encompassing reality, or at least this reality that encompasses all we've ever known? We could call it a subconscious part of ourselves and be done with it. But that's not entirely accurate or true. This reality, this, let's call it "ideal mode of being," this "ideal person," is the same and constant across all human beings. And it is, by all accounts of what is knowable, unique to human beings. Therefore it has nothing to do with animals or inanimate objects. We don't see objects, by the way. Many people think we see objects and infer tool use. It's exactly the other way around. We can only see tools and infer from them the object/ category. It has been useful, for us, to group the matter out of which we're made into atoms, subatomic particles etc. Similarly, we've grouped the interconnected structure of the parts of our brain and the parts of "external" reality that make up the "ideal person" into the category of gods or, in our more recent historical past, into the idea of a singular God. It's a sophisticated idea. It fits all the criteria: He is all that is omnipotent, omniscient, and good, which as I've explained are only different angles from which to perceive the same ideal mode of being. Is He a person? He is certainly conceptualized as a fully-formed, well-rounded, ideal person, not a tree, or a thought, or energy etc. Is He a *real* person? Why not just call it a hypothetical person and be done with it? Well, by definition, hypotheses are creations of our own conscious mind. What I've described, however, is an aspect of at least in part the subconscious mind; as well as something that I think everyone knows implicitly and thus doesn't need to be actually articulated to be known, whether you feel it as a pantheon of gods that toy with your emotions and govern your life (as the ancient Greeks did,) or an instinctive ideal, or goal, or whatever. But why is "person" the definition that's the most accurate/ truthful/ useful? Because He acts like one person, not like multiple persons. And He does rule over us, we don't always get a say in the matter like we do with mere goals and self-constructed ideologies. When we act like He's real and His ideas are sound, we reduce our suffering. When we don't, we're punished with suffering. Sure, the God I've established, while person-like, is made up of several distinct parts. I could just say "That's not God, that's (insert previous paragraphs.)" But then again, you're also made up of several distinct parts. You're a nervous system inside other body parts which consist of atoms which themselves seem perfectly distinct and unremarkable. Yet put it all together and I choose to--arbitrarily--call this vaguely defined set of atoms, this "you," a person. But even then, all of your atoms are replaced every 5 years. You're quite literally a concept. Yet I choose to call you a person because doing so minimizes pain. Because you're real. I choose to call Him God because doing so minimizes pain. Because He's real.