God exists.

I'm arguing the point "God exists," and have taken up the definition you provided. I accept premises 1 and 3 as a fair though as you said in-exhaustive representation of those arguments. However, I do not accept premise 2 nor the two paragraphs that follow the premises as representative. They omit key constituents and are inaccurately worded, which might have led to some confusion. First, I took care not to confuse a concept (which I initially referred to as a hypothesis) of God with the actual God Himself. I only called a human person a "concept" to allude to the mind's difficulties of conceptual clustering/ categorization. However, your argument makes premise 2 come across like you use the word "concept" in the sense of "hypothetical" instead of "that which is most real." My point is that we do not have an idea/ hypothesis/ concept of God in our minds. We have the actual God in our minds. (If this is what you meant, I apologize.) Second, reducing God to "the ideal person" does not do the argument justice. I freely admit that I think it's difficult to sum up the idea of God in a few words, yet in my estimation I provided enough of a detailed explanation. To put it perhaps a little more straight-forward: Our reality is but our knowledge of reality, which is subconscious knowledge + articulated knowledge. There is a set of fixed phenomena that determine the interplay of our bodies and the external world in all human beings across space and time. We carry implicit, ancestral knowledge of these phenomena in our nervous system. This knowledge is more conducive to minimizing pain than all articulated knowledge (logic and reasoning--which doesn't make these not conducive at all.) This implicit knowledge is the awareness of an omnipotent, omnipresent, all good person, and of how to treat Him. That which minimizes pain is true. Acting out God's commands minimizes pain ultimately. Therefore God's commands, including the one to believe in Him, are true. Therefore He truly exists. More on that below. To simplify dramatically: knowledge of ideal person + truth + acted-out truth + environment = God. Next, regardless of whether premise 1 is true, I argued that God exists whether you believe in Him or not, although everybody believes in Him subconsciously. You can only deny His existence explicitly. Calling this knowledge "reassuring" misses the mark. You're talking to the wrong guy if you think I'm advocating for the existence of an afterlife, or that God grants wishes without us putting any effort into anything. Further, life exists in an ocean of chaos. God minimizes suffering, but He cannot extinguish it. You can be the most God-fearing person and still find yourself in a concentration camp. However, by rebelling against God, you make everything that's already bad worse. That's the point. More inaccurate wording misrepresents my argument as negative utilitarianism. There's a difference between "minimize" and "extinguish." To minimize something is to act upon it continuously. To extinguish something is to end its existence. I never said the purpose of life is to extinguish suffering. I said the purpose of life is to minimize suffering. That's why we shouldn't just all "peacefully" die by some external event beyond our knowledge. If we're dead, we can't minimize suffering. As for the nuclear holocaust example: To commit suicide/ murder, you have to first be in a position where you don't minimize suffering anymore. To be able to make the decision to wipe out all life on earth, you have to first maximize suffering for yourself, your own mind. And your own mind is the only world you know. Thus, up until after the moment of your genocidal action you first have to do the opposite of the good action. So even if genocide itself was the good action, you'll never get there by minimizing suffering. But then, destroying a person doesn't minimize suffering, it "freezes" whatever suffering they had, then extinguishes their capacity to minimize suffering further. Please provide an example of two mutually exclusive messages that both minimize suffering. It doesn't happen. You said, "Truth is the correspondence of a claim to reality." This is technically wrong. In a reductionist semantic game this rule might suffice, but it contradicts Darwinism. Sorry, it just won't do. Truth is information that minimizes suffering. No more, no less. That's what primates have evolved to do. We cannot interact with objective reality. Period. If by "correspondence," however, you mean "highest possible approximation," and by "a claim" you mean "information," and by "reality" you mean "utility," then fine. Why fog the issue with unsophisticated wording? When you accurately claim your dog is black you indeed minimize suffering, yes. What else do you think you're doing? Pointing out the photons' inherent attribute of blackness? Talking to yourself for no reason? You're communicating your subjective perception to someone. Why? So they don't get confused. Why? So they don't make more mistakes than necessary. Why? So they don't die eventually. Go ahead. Start claiming things are different colors than what you think they are. Unironically. Get back to me and tell me you don't contribute to suffering. Like I said, we see only tools and infer possible objects. We cannot see objects as such. On to the idea of God itself: I've already explained why omniscience, omnipotence, and omnibenevolence necessarily manifest as minimizing pain. You'll have to do more than simply repeat the definitions for omniscience and omnipotence (which I stated myself almost verbatim!) if you want to sever their connection to minimizing pain. You may try again to actually refute the relevant points I made in my opening argument. Copied and pasted for your convenience: "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." Perhaps reiterating this helps: Pain is the fundamental reality. Without pain, there is no such thing as knowledge or power/ control. As far as evidence for usefulness goes, there are mountains of psychological research which admittedly I can't really do justice. The most glaring and obvious one, which will have to suffice for the purposes of this debate, is Western Society. Our society is by far the most meaningful one (reduces suffering the best) according to every poll, every study, the actions of millions of migrants, and the emergence of economic and scientific pain-reducing wonders. All this is founded upon Judaeo-Christian monotheism. I'm afraid if you don't at least agree with this point, this debate is going to last forever. There are people who say the Renaissance wasn't a thing, or wasn't religiously motivated. If you're one of those people, this debate is going to get very complicated. If not, let's boil it down to this: The West has been heavily influenced by Judaeo-Christian monotheism for almost 2000 years. The rest of the world has not. Right? Okay. The West has fared far better than the rest of the world. I don't think this is up for debate. (Islam, while technically monotheistic, is a tyrannical ideology. I hope you see the difference between the Bible (an edited collection of ancient myths which sometimes manage to allude to natural/ subconscious knowledge; art) and the Quran (artificial, deliberately misleading political propaganda; not art.) If not, well ... you get the idea.) Consider also the following religious archetypes: - blasphemy - hypocrisy - the mind falling in love with its own inventions - dishonesty - deception - betrayal - lack of sacrifice - not bearing one's burden - self-pity - greed - cheating - selfishness God is the person who never commits these acts and simultaneously punishes them. A cursory glance at lawsuits, divorces, happiness polls, and the history of the 20th century reveals that nobody gets away with any of these acts. Whether this is part of a self-regulating social structure or an aspect of what I've described as God, it's still the case. On your final point: Sometimes, in life, there is no pain. Even if only for a short period of time. When this happens, it's because we have minimized pain. We have spoken the truth. We have acted out our implicit knowledge of God, or the God archetype, or whatever sounds the most real to you. And He in turn has kept His promise that speaking the truth works. Again, you can phrase it differently. That doesn't make it any more useful.