To use faith as your reasoning for one specific god is irrational.

Rebuttal My opponent in his opening round has failed to address the actual topic, instead he has attempted to attack alternate options, He has not attempted to show that belief in a specific god is rational. I am not burdened to show that belief in God is rational. According to the resolution, I am burdened to show that using faith as one's reasoning for believing in God is rational. Using epistemological analysis, I gave a thorough argument as to why it is rational. It's rational to use faith because, in the final analysis, faith is used in all our reasoning. He completely ignored the part about SPECIFIC god. Instead he has attempted presuppositional apologetics. While presuppositional apologetics may be fun to debate it is a argument ad absurdum based on a false dichotomy. In your own words, "In this debate my opponent will have to show that it is logical to put faith in a specific god. " That's what I did. I am not arguing that God exists in this debate because that's not what you demanded of me. You demanded that I show logical congruity when it comes to using faith as reasoning in believing in a specific God. I chose to use a philosophical argument regarding the nature of knowledge. You have falsely attributed to me an argument I never made. To attack other options as irrational does nothing. Imagine that you had to pick with combination of lottery balls is going to come out, it is irrational to believe with any certainty that any combination will come out with any certainty. To attempt to argue that one is rational because the other are irrational is ridiculous. This is a red herring. I made no such argument about "other options. " Now my opponent in order to understand rational versus irrational has to do with what falls under logic. In this debate logic must be a properly basic or foundational belief. In order to take this debate about being rational you must accept logic. According to the tripartite theory of knowledge, we know something if it is true, believed, and justified. You just asked me to accept logic as a foundational belief, to which I will gladly do. That is to say, you just argued that logic does not need to be justified, i. e. , it should be accepted as true without justification. This is faith. That's the thrust of my argument. That one's belief in God—or anything for that matter—can be rationally based on faith. Whether they are right or wrong is irrelevant. You asked me to show that using faith to believe in God is rational. If we can rationally use faith as a basis for accepting logic, then one can rationally use faith to reason to God. Since we have accepted logic, then we must accept the logical construct of Occam's razor, and since god is a lot of baggage without any evidence it is better to not start with that baggage then to start with it. Occam's razor has nothing to with this debate. My opponent is moving the goal posts. Both his opening round and the debate title explicitly state that I am to show that it is logical to use faith as a basis for accepting God. A completely different way to look at it is like this there are at least this many options: thor, zues, Yahwey(jewish), Yeshua(christian), allah(islam), dionysus, fly spagetti monster, and the invisible pink unicorn. Being my opponent has provided no evidence for any the odds of any given one being rignt if those are the only options( they are not) is 1 in 8 or 12.5 %. So believe an individual god on those options alone is irrational. Once again, my opponent is arguing some other debate. I am arguing that it is logically coherent to use faith as a basis for reasoning to any one of these eight options. Obviously, some or all of these options might be false, but that's not the issue. The issue is, even if someone uses faith to reason to the existence of the flying spaghetti monster, they are logically valid in doing so because, according to my argument, it is impossible to reason from anything but faith. Conclusion My opponent has pulled the good old bait-and-switch in order to win. I ask the readers to reread the debate resolution title and the opening statements of my opponent. In round one, he argued that using faith when reasoning about God was fallacious. I countered that claim, and now he's acting like I'm supposed to defend the very existence of the Christian God over and above all other deities. Allow me to reiterate my thesis: the resolution is negated because reasoning from faith is inevitable. To say that reasoning from faith is irrational is to invalidate all arguments ever made for any topic. That's my position, and I invite my opponent to refute this argument rather than the straw man he provided in round two.