From revival meetings held in abandoned storefronts to seminars conducted in university halls, author R. Eugene Bales stumbled his way from youth as a fledgling fundamentalist preacher to adulthood as a nonbelieving academic.

Through a series of essays, he chronicles his spiritual journey that began in a white frame building that housed the Church of God in a dust-blown southwestern Kansas town. Here he learned the books of the Bible, was born again, baptized, sanctified holy, sang specials for Sunday morning services, and preached his first sermon. While attending the University of Wichita and serving as assistant to the pastor in a suburban church, he experienced an epiphany of doubt that collided with the teachings of his boyhood church. Advanced training in philosophy gave him analytical tools that he neededto critically evaluate conceptual underpinnings of religious claims.

In But Then My Voice Changed, Bales explains why traditional notions central to religious faith are fundamentally incoherent. He argues that the evidence of so-called religious experience is a chimaera, and he challenges orthodox pictures of the relationship of the body to the soul; of the continued existence of a conscious, disembodied soul after death; of heaven and hell; of miracles, the resurrection, and the efficacy of prayer.

But Then My Voice Changed

From Fundamentalist to Nonbeliever: One Man's StoryBy R. Eugene Bales

Abbott Press

Copyright © 2012 R. Eugene Bales
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4582-0580-3

Contents

Introduction...............................................................................................viiPart 1: When I was a child, I spake as a child.—1 Corinthians 13:11..................................1Chapter 1: So Many Doctrines...............................................................................2Chapter 2: Church and Community............................................................................8Chapter 3: Celebrations....................................................................................12Chapter 4: God Talk........................................................................................16Chapter 5: My First Revival................................................................................19Chapter 6: Heaven and Hell.................................................................................24Chapter 7: Authority of the Elders.........................................................................27Chapter 8: "Godless Science"...............................................................................31Chapter 9: How to Choose?..................................................................................34Chapter 10: The Power of Prayer............................................................................36Chapter 11: Other Perspectives.............................................................................40Chapter 12: Crisis.........................................................................................49Chapter 13: Army Reserves..................................................................................55Chapter 14: Nietzsche......................................................................................57Chapter 15: Senior Year at Wichita U.......................................................................64Chapter 16: Theism, Deism, Pantheism.......................................................................68Chapter 17: First Teaching Job.............................................................................73Chapter 18: Grad Study at Wichita U........................................................................175Chapter 19: Grad Study at Wichita U........................................................................283Chapter 20: "The Will to Believe"..........................................................................86Chapter 21: Crisis 2.......................................................................................89Chapter 22: A Liberal Christian?...........................................................................92Part 2: But when I became a man, I put away childish things.—1 Corinthians 13:11.....................99Chapter 1: Invitations and Persuasion......................................................................100Chapter 2: Aquinas: Ways One through Four..................................................................122Chapter 3: Aquinas: The Fifth Way..........................................................................128Chapter 4: The Ontological Argument........................................................................134Chapter 5: God and the Basis of Morality...................................................................141Chapter 6: The Argument from Religious Experience..........................................................146Chapter 7: Critique of William James's "The Will to Believe"...............................................155Chapter 8: Miracles........................................................................................170Chapter 9: Body and Soul...................................................................................176Chapter 10: Disembodied Souls..............................................................................189Chapter 11: The Problem of Evil............................................................................198Chapter 12: "God is Love"..................................................................................203Chapter 13: "Prayer Changes Things"........................................................................207Chapter 14: Sense and Nonsense.............................................................................215Chapter 15: Falsifiability.................................................................................224Chapter 16: "Theology and Falsification"...................................................................228Chapter 17: Hare and Bliks.................................................................................231Chapter 18: On Religious Faith: A Reply to Basil Mitchell..................................................237Chapter 19: The Language of Faith..........................................................................247Chapter 20: An Immodest Proposal...........................................................................259Chapter 21: Conclusion.....................................................................................266Endnotes...................................................................................................271About the Author...........................................................................................285

Chapter One

so many doctrines

A few days after my twelfth birthday my parents and I moved to a windblown southwestern Kansas town, population about sixteen hundred, struggling in the 1940s to scrabble its way out of the Dust Bowl. The wind scattered sand, candy wrappers, dried leaves, and an occasional cigarette butt along brick-paved Main Street. Walking along Main from our home to downtown, I passed directly in front of the Church of God. A few steps further on I could see six other churches: Church of the Nazarene, Methodist, Bible Baptist, Assembly of God, Christian, and the Church of Christ. Saint Joan of Arc Catholic church, viewed by most of the townspeople with a suspicion usually reserved for communists and other atheists, was tucked away in the far southwest corner of town. Eight churches, sixteen hundred people—and not all of them were churchgoers.

Mother and I attended the Church of God. I know now that she cherished a lifelong commitment to the Methodist church. (At the time, my dad really didn't care; and my older brother was grown and away living on his own.) But we were new in town, and my seventh grade classmates from the Church of God were friendly to me at school and invited me to join them. Mother wanted to support me, so we attended Church of God services, paid our tithes, and became regulars in that community.

The Church of God congregation worshipped in a white frame structure with a basement that contained rooms for Sunday school. Upstairs, the sanctuary was furnished with wooden pews. At the front of the room, a stage-like platform held a crude pulpit and an upright piano. On the wall behind the pulpit was a large painting of a fair-haired, fair-skinned, blue-eyed Jesus kneeling in the garden of Gethsemane. Between the pulpit and the congregation was a long, low bench that we called the altar, where those who were troubled or in other need of spiritual help could come forward at the end of the service, kneel, and receive the prayers and encouragement of the preacher and other members of the congregation.

Ours was not one of those hillbilly, holy-roller Churches of God, thank you. The movement with which we were affiliated had a national headquarters in Anderson, Indiana. Our church had its own college, Anderson College, its own press, The Gospel Trumpet Press, and its own radio program, where we could listen to sermons delivered by Reverend Dale Oldham, pastor of the church in Anderson.

In Sunday school, the other children and I studied scriptural passages and learned the church's teachings. For as long as I could remember, Mother had read Bible stories to me out of Hurlbut's Bible Story Book. But at Sunday school, our lessons were organized around courses of study created by church headquarters and published by The Gospel Trumpet Press. We learned the books of the Bible and underlined the verses in our Bibles that we were taught held special significance. We learned that God had created the world in seven days. In the beginning, there had been just a big void, and everything was dark. But then God created light, and then the heavens and the earth with all the plants and animals. Then, as his crowning achievement, God created Adam and Eve and placed them in the garden of Eden. Everything in the garden was for Adam and Eve to eat except the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and God told them not to eat of it. Then the Devil tempted Eve with the forbidden fruit, and she tempted Adam with it, and they disobeyed God and sinned.

At Sunday morning worship service our congregation sang gospel songs and shared in the fellowship of the community. We learned of the glories of heaven and the terrors of hell. I went forward and was saved; I was born again. I was baptized. I participated in the ritual of Holy Communion, with Welch's Grape Juice and unleavened crackers. I liked to sing; I felt I was good at it. I frequently sang a "special" for Sunday morning services.

In his sermons, our preacher talked a lot about Adam and Eve's disobedience in the garden of Eden: They had gone against God's explicit prohibitions and, as a result, were expelled from Eden. This violation had marked their souls indelibly with original sin, and this blemish would be passed on forever to their descendants. But God had sent his only begotten son, Jesus, to redeem mankind. By accepting Jesus as our personal savior, we could experience salvation, be saved from our sins, and be born again. Yet only by a second act of grace could the blot of original sin be cleansed from our souls. And by this means, we could be sanctified holy—no longer tainted by Adam and Eve's fall. Our spiritual goal was to be saved and sanctified holy.

One of the distinctive practices of our church was the practice of the washing of feet. This, according to the preacher, was done in commemoration of Jesus washing his disciples' feet, as recounted in John 13. It was symbolic of our service to one another.

The preacher stressed that ours was a nondenominational church, that is, not a denomination like the Methodist and Baptist churches. You couldn't just join the Church of God as if it were another social club! Everyone who had been born again was a member of the Church of God.

Our congregation taught a very strict code of behavior: no movies, dancing, smoking, swearing, or cheating at school. The very thought of sex was forbidden, as was "playing with yourself," consuming alcohol, and ostentatious adornments. Some women even spoke of feeling guilty about wearing a wedding ring, but the church condoned the practice because it was a public expression of a woman's marital status. As such, it would tend to discourage the woman from straying and would notify other men than she was already taken.

In his sermons, our preacher emphasized that only by repenting of our sins and accepting Jesus Christ as our personal savior could we be saved from the torments of hell. Living a moral life and being a good person were not enough. At the final judgment, only those who had been born again, who accepted Jesus into their lives and believed in him with all their hearts, could join him at the right hand of God throughout eternity.

As my classmates and I grew into our high school years, we presented plays, sometimes organized our own worship services, and occasionally even were asked to deliver sermons at Sunday morning worship. I gave my first sermon, "Reasonable Reasons," when I was seventeen. Some members of the congregation congratulated me on my delivery and the organization of my talk. Some even speculated that it suggested a call to preach. But in my sermon, I cited evolution, and some of the senior members of our congregation were not pleased. I didn't understand what all the fuss was about. It seemed to me that evolution was quite consistent with any but the most militantly literal reading of Genesis. I couldn't see why God, being all-powerful, couldn't have planned creation that way if he wanted to. But at that time, I was uncomfortable being at odds with the leaders of my congregation.

I encountered other complications. One Christmas Eve, I organized a few of my friends to visit the local Catholic church to observe its service. The leaders of my church expressed disapproval, as they considered this visit to be consorting with the enemy.

As a sophomore in high school I was deeply conflicted when an English teacher rented the Lawrence Olivier film of Shakespeare's Henry V to show to our class. Our teacher thought it was a wonderful way to help our class understand Shakespeare and the production of his plays. But our church taught that watching movies was sinful because movies were produced by godless studios that portrayed immoral people and featured actors and actresses who were adulterers. Yet here was a film being used as an educational tool. How was I to deal with this?

Some denominations didn't share other beliefs important to our faith. For example, the Church of Christ didn't allow instrumental music in their services. No other congregation in town practiced a ritual of foot washing. Most did not teach a doctrine of being "saved and sanctified holy." Some allowed their young people to learn how to dance and to attend movies. Others did not refer to their minister as "Reverend"; such usage was nowhere to be found in the Bible, they insisted. Yet most of the churches taught that theirs was the true path to salvation, that all others were flawed. I began to wonder how they could be so sure they were right. Surely the churches couldn't all be right, not when their teachings were in direct conflict with those of other congregations. I thought that some of my friends at school who belonged to other churches were more admirable than some young people from our own church—some who were capable of thoughtlessness and downright cruelty toward our schoolmates. It wasn't just that the boys from my congregation fell short of some of the codes of behavior taught by our church. I had been taught—and understood—that people do not always live up to their ideals. I was concerned that my other friends, not being privy to the true way espoused by my church, were at risk of going to hell because they were of another faith.

My mother encouraged me to concentrate less on details of denominational doctrine and more on the best of the varieties of doctrines, such as the virtues of kindness, compassion, and truthfulness. She said she wanted her boys to be good boys. She talked about Jesus and his life and the virtues of love, forgiveness, and acceptance of others' differences that he had exhibited. That was the way she had come to terms with the conflict of doctrines.

But how could I know which of the varieties of doctrines were the best? "Just choose the best from each" seemed to be wonderful advice, at least as my mother gave it. I still didn't know how I was supposed to decide which was the best.

My life was thrown into further turmoil when I fell in love with a new girl in town, a Baptist girl. To make matters worse, her brother-inlaw was the new preacher at the Baptist church, and her father was a Baptist evangelist.

The Baptists introduced their new spiritual leadership with special services that featured my girlfriend's father as the invited speaker. I attended some of the services and was impressed by the passion with which he delivered his messages. But they were not entirely consistent with the message of the Church of God.

My girlfriend's mother and older sister, the wife of the new pastor, were among the gentlest and most loving women I had ever met. But they were not of the Church of God faith. I wondered if their souls were at risk. This was not trivial; we were dealing with issues of salvation or damnation.

Just in our dusty, windblown little town, I was confronted with at least eight different congregations—each with its own leader and each one certain that it possessed the true message for ensuring the soul's eternal salvation. The problem for me was not merely that there were different doctrines. How could I be sure that the Church of God doctrines were the right ones?

Chapter Two

church and community

The churches in town provided the social center for most of the townspeople. People could find a sense of belonging to something larger than themselves in church. Going to church called for cleaning yourself up and dressing in nice clothes; that made you feel good about yourself. For many believers, church was a place of joy.

The churches were communities in miniature. People were identified with their churches, and in large part their sense of self-identity was shaped by their church affiliation. Lifelong friendships developed in the church communities. Business relationships were cemented. Political alliances were formed. Members of a faith enjoyed a wide, perhaps even international, support network. When traveling in a strange environment, they could find a bit of home in a church of their own denomination.

Fellow churchgoers visited you when you were in the hospital. In good times, they shared your joy. In times of trouble, they provided support. In times of grief, they provided comfort.

Church is where children learned to sing parts, to read music, and, their parents hoped, find a marriage partner who shared their faith. Children achieved a level of biblical literacy essential for their understanding of our culture no matter what their religious persuasion turned out to be. The minister officiated at their weddings. Church ladies prepared refreshments for the wedding receptions; at funerals, they provided food for bereaved families.

Believers found churchgoing to be perhaps their most meaningful experience of the week. They were uplifted by being in the midst of like-minded people in beautiful surroundings, listening to devotional music and words of praise. They seemed to experience peace of mind and a sense of renewal and to be buoyed by a recommitment to their faith. They left services ready to face the challenges of the week ahead.

Believers derived comfort from their faith. They were confident that confessing and repenting of their wrongdoings could free them from their sense of guilt. In their faith, they found what they believed to be answers to the mysteries of birth, life, and death. They thought of a wanted newborn child as a gift from God. They felt that through their faith their life was imbued with meaning, and that the tragedies they experienced gained significance. They were assured that in death they would enter into a new life to be united with loved ones and with God. They believed that faith gave their life meaning and purpose.

Our church community had no officially recognized group of elders as I understood the Church of Christ did. We didn't have deacons either. But I thought of the older men in our congregation, those who provided the lay leadership for the church community, as "elders," and that is how I shall refer to them throughout these essays. As men of longevity in the church, projecting a certain maturity of wisdom, they obviously were influential; indeed, sometimes the pastor called on them to share the burden of leadership as advisors and guardians of the faith. They always could be counted on to shout "Amen!" at appropriate places in the services. Some of them presented a solemn, even dour, front, while some others exuded smug self-righteousness. Others liked a good joke (clean, of course) and seemed generally good-humored. Intermarriage among their families was common.

The elders were, as far as I knew, faithful to the church's code of conduct. I never heard of one of them smoking, drinking alcohol, swearing, going to the movies or dances, or failing to attend church services except when they or members of their family were seriously ill. They were, from all outward appearances, faithful in marriage; I don't know how faithful they were in keeping their bills paid. They provided for the financial needs of the church. I never heard of one of them being involved in a scandal—one of their children or grandchildren, maybe, but not one of the elders.

Other members of the congregation seemed less dogmatic and doctrinaire. In general, I liked them better than the elders. Some gave part-time and summer jobs to the young people in the church. One man, who became one of the most important role models in my life, gave me an after-school job sweeping the floors in his department store. Later, I worked my way up to stock boy and eventually to a position as a clerk on the sales floor on Saturdays when the cowboys came into town to shop. Scrupulously honest, my boss wouldn't tolerate sloppy work, but he was kind and fair to his employees. At one point, he agreed to be the teacher for my Sunday school class. I suspect he never was comfortable in that role, but he was willing to take on the task because some of the other boys and I said we wanted him for our teacher.

On different occasions during the summer, I drove a tractor for two other members of the congregation who taught me the importance of discipline. The work could be dangerous, after all. I couldn't be careless; I had to keep my mind on what I was doing.

Sometimes other townspeople who were not members of our congregation supported the young people in our church with their generosity. When I was still in junior high, I learned a lesson in basic economics from the lady who owned the variety store in town. A member of the Reorganized Latter Day Saints congregation in a neighboring town, she sold me an Ingersoll pocket watch for a dollar down and twenty-five cents a week until it was paid off. Our preacher's son worked several years in the supermarket; the owners attended the Church of Christ. For a while, I candled eggs there. Later, when I was in college, the town banker, a Methodist, lent me money to pay for college expenses. I would borrow the money to pay for the college year's tuition in the fall and then repay it the next summer from my summer job.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from But Then My Voice Changedby R. Eugene Bales Copyright © 2012 by R. Eugene Bales. Excerpted by permission of Abbott Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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