Ah, the invisible gardener/invisible purple dragon/flying spaghetti monster argument. I've heard variants.

See, this is what should properly be called a straw man. An inaccurate portrayal of someone else's arguments or beliefs, propped up for easy knocking down. Those who accuse Christians of "invisible gardener" arguments have never, in my experience, ever listened to a theologian's actual apologetics and instead insert this little parable to describe what they imagine are the Christian's beliefs. Accusing the Christian of goal-post moving... even as they hurriedly move their own goalposts backwards as fast as they can run.

But you can't prove anything to a fool.

We have submitted our beliefs over and over again to the ultimate testing lab-- the real world. Again and again, we have been proven right. We have, in fact, submitted the core of our faith to the ultimate falsifiability at Golgotha. There were two possible outcomes at Calvary: either everything Christ said about Himself and His Father was true, and His tomb would be empty... or he was just a lunatic and a liar and his corpse would be dragged before the people of the world, and his cult would die then and there. The material evidence-- his body-- was secured by the authorities, overseen by hostile witnesses, sealed in a tomb with a boulder and a legal seal that was a death sentence to break, and placed under guard by roman legionnaires for three days. The power and authority of an entire Empire was set in place to prove His claims false. By their own reasoning, debunking Christianity and everything connected with it should have been a slam dunk. A thousand times easier than taking candy from a baby. It was the perfect set up.

And yet, three days later... the body was gone. Two thousand years later, and all the enemies of Christianity combined, including the most powerful Empires the earth has ever known, have STILL not brought out the body.

But you can't prove anything to a fool.

What's more, every witness of the things Jesus did and said, dozens of them, died UNDER TORTURE, swearing that it was true, that they had seen it... with no possible reward for their insistence but slow, gruesome and hideous death, no possible punishment for their reneging but freedom and life. A single one of his apostles recanting would have shattered the growing Christian community. Yet none, not ONE, of those eyewitnesses recanted.

But you can't prove anything to a fool.

Christianity's own strongest evidence is its own existence. It is a belief system that, by its own parameters, should not and could not exist if even a microscopic portion of it were false. And yet here we are.

But you can't prove anything to a fool.

Invisible gardeners? Flying spaghetti monsters? I believe the bible for the simple fact that I cannot stand there getting whacked in the face with the absolute truth and not inevitably break down and believe it. Let these fools chase their Piltdown men and their pigs' teeth and their sketches of the World that Never Was, and sit around sweatily reassuring each other that their latest batch of ImagionationLand just-so stories are the truth. You can't teach a fool the truth anymore than you can teach a pig to whistle.