I just watched an interesting documentary about the famous 'Skull of Doom' (aka the Mitchell-Hedges skull), the most elaborate of the crystal skulls which were at one time thought to have been made by the Mayan civilisation thousands of years ago. Only fairly recently has science progressed to the point where these skulls could be examined closely enough to determine that they could not possibly have been made by ancient people with ancient tools. They show evidence of rotary tools, for example cutting wheels, which were never used by the ancients. In fact the skulls are thought to have been produced in the late 1800s or early 1900s, when such tools would have been, if not readily available, then certainly available if you wanted to go to such lengths as to fool people with so-called 'ancient' crystal artifacts.

So this smashes to pieces the claims by the happy hippy New Age freaks who believe the skulls are invested with magical powers stretching back to ancient Central America. Right? Er, not quite. It seems that now the evidence proves that the tools needed to create these skulls could not have existed thousands of years ago, then obviously (you'll like this) this is proof that the skulls were made by an alien civilisation who left them behind so that we could use them to keep in contact with the aliens. The word 'wacko' springs to mind.

I'm mentioning this here because it showed to me that again and again when people are faced with overwhelming evidence to contradict and utterly shatter their beliefs, they just make a slight detour, change the story, and head out in a different and even more freakishly stupid direction, without so much as a second thought. This is how apologetics works. Take an element of religious dogma. Subject it to rigorous scrutiny. Thoroughly debunk it. Find a wacky but passably credible explanation as to why the original dogma might not be wrong after all. Go with it until someone else finds the cracks in that theory. Repeat the process, papering over the cracks again and again.

People of faith are people devoid of the power to reason, to objectively look at their beliefs and accept criticism, evidence and the opinions of others. It doesn't matter if it's a crystal skull or a collection of old stories in a religious book, someone out there will believe whatever they want to believe, even if you produce a mountain of evidence proving that the things into which they put their faith have no basis in fact and can often be proven to be unquestionably false.