The Wind in His Fists

I just found this blog, Memoirs of an ex-Christian. The text at the top caught my eye.

Welcome! This blog covers my thoughts and struggles as an ex-Christian. After going through a serious faith struggle about five years ago, I don’t consider myself a Christian anymore. This blog covers my daily thoughts on this paradigm shift.

Scary thing, these paradigm shifts. As I have questioned my own faith, this is one thing that has haunted me. I think the “hardening of the heart” would look just like a Kuhnian paradigm shift.

I cannot accept a sort of logical positivist epsitemology. I clearly see the subjective nature of any knowlege or belief. So, I also see that what I do and do not, at the present time, believe, is strongly influenced by subjective inclinations and factors. There is reason to believe that Christian faith is essentially subjective, though based on objective facts. In fact belief in any proposition is always essentially subjective, as Polanyi has shown. Evidence can never lead to 100% certainty apart from this subjective element. The movement from uncertainty to more certainty is always subjective in nature. In fact, this is true about any knowlege, including scientific knowlege.

So, because Christian faith has this subjective, internal component, because whether I believe or not depends on my subjective inclinations, predispositions, paradigms, etc., it is concievable that I could lose my faith due to a change only in these internal factors.

Is this what the writer to the Hebrews calls a hardening of the heart? It is conceivable that I could be looking at the same evidence that used to convince me, and it no longer convinces me because of a change within me – a hardening.

So, as the Holy Spirit says:
“Today, if you hear his voice,
do not harden your hearts
as you did in the rebellion,
during the time of testing in the desert,
where your fathers tested and tried me
and for forty years saw what I did.
That is why I was angry with that generation,
and I said, ‘Their hearts are always going astray,
and they have not known my ways.’
So I declared on oath in my anger,
‘They shall never enter my rest.’

And the writer continues:

See to it, brothers, that none of you has a sinful, unbelieving heart that turns away from the living God. But encourage one another daily, as long as it is called Today, so that none of you may be hardened by sin’s deceitfulness.

Sin hardens, according to the writer. What would it look like, what would it be like if I were hardened by sin, and my heart became “unbelieving.” I think it would look like a paradigm shift. It’s like the duck-rabbit, only you can’t see the duck at all anymore.