Religion philosopher Tom Frost engaged a crowd of Northwestern students in a debate about the probability of an “inexplicable being” Monday night in the first installment of a three-part series on the existence and nature of God.
The event, sponsored by Campus Crusade for Christ, drew about 175 NU students to Ryan Family Auditorium.
Frost, who is working on a PhD in philosophy at the University of Wisconsin and is the co-founder of the Foundation for Reasonable Christianity, attempted to present a logical argument for why a god exists. Frost has visited many college campuses in the past year and has gained notoriety for causing uproar.
“In my experience, the vast majority of people are religiously devout for sociological and psychological reasons much more so than intellectual reasons per se,” Frost said.
“I think that’s wrong,” he said. “If we cannot find a reasonable, logical, compelling case that can presented for why God exists, I don’t think we should believe.”
Over the course of half hour, Frost outlined a multi-step argument, positing that if we are to accept a “defined set” of “explainable facts,” there must be an “inexplicable” fact responsible for their creation. He reached a final conclusion that by definition, the “inexplicable” entity would have to be also immaterial and invisible.
Frost welcomed students to the stage to debate his remarks. Frost addressed questions based on the premises of his philosophy.
As the conversations wore on, delving deeper into more complex points, the crowd began to thin out as students left the auditorium.
A core group of the audience seemed deadset on debunking Frost’s theory, staying past the close of the event at 9:45 p.m. to question him in a small circle on stage.
Frost had a particularly difficult time fielding questions of physics and mathematical set theory that intersected with his own method of discourse. He was unembarrassed to admit that some of his answers were tentative.
McCormick freshman Ren Zhao said as Frost added layers to his proof, he lost audience members because they were “finding his loopholes.”
Communication sophomore Jared Kling, one of the students who debated with Frost, thought Frost attempted to answer as well as he could.
“I think the problem that a lot of us were running into,” he said, “was disagreement over definitions, over what ‘fact’ is, what is ‘explainable.'”
Weinberg freshman Madeline Masten, a Campus Crusade member, said Frost took a good approach by keeping his argument “very logical and interesting and keeping it away from anybody’s personal convictions.”
She said, however, that his inability to sway doubters showed that “human reason, human words don?t cultivate faith.”
Event organizer Hanell Allison, a Weinberg junior, said Campus Crusade brought Frost to campus to ignite a spiritual debate.
“For a campus that is in some ways so bright and so intelligent, it’s missing an understanding or an interest in some of these and maybe most important questions,” she said.
Reach Jordan Weissmann at [email protected].
