Another hedgehog bit

"People just don't think things through, do they?" Powers said, putting the book down on a packing crate.

"I thought you were going to throw it for a moment," Rob said, as a hedgehog swung down on a trapeze, picked the book up and swung away again.

"Thank you for your restraint," Zander added.

"I may be an unprincipled, all-powerful spirit of chaos and mayhem, but there are some things you don't do," Powers said primly.

"So what's got your chaotic knickers in a twist this time?" Rob inquired.

Powers glared. "People not knowing how to think about gods. They talk about fighting gods with logic and science. Surely it must be obvious that if gods exist, then they must be logical, and any scientific argument against their existence is founded on a false premise. Contrariwise, if they're not logical, then they don't exist, and any scientific argument against their existence is redundant."

"But," Rob began, and stopped. In the momentary silence a distant "whee!" resounded from overhead.

"What my colleague means to say," Zander interjected smoothly, "is that if gods are--as some people have theorised--sustained by the belief of their worshippers, then arguing logically against their existence would weaken that belief and therefore weaken the god."

Rob nodded gratefully.

"And you're seriously advancing that proposition?" Powers said incredulously. "'If you don't believe in it it will go away?' That's a total capitulation to the most egregious kind of magical thinking. What else is there in the multiverse, what real thing, that you could get rid of by simply saying 'you don't exist'? Nothing. Why should any such thing exist in the first place? Where could it have come from before there were people to believe in it? No. Either something is real or it is not. If it is real, no amount of denial will erase it from reality. If it isn't, no amount of affirmation will make it so."

"An idea," Rob said suddenly. "A meme. If god is an idea, then people create it and sustain it, and it becomes real."

"Does it? Does it really?" Powers was laughing now. "Then where are all these gods? Why don't we see them around? Ideas are not real, my silly young friend. Ideas are the epitome of unreal. What people do with them, do in their name, say and think and write, those are real, but the idea itself is airy nothing. Unless, of course, you maintain that an idea can become a real thing in itself--in which case it can't be argued away, and pretending that it isn't real is asinine. If the idea of a god is a real thing then it must be treated like all other real things. If it isn't, then you can't do anything about it."

"You're saying that whether gods are real or not, there's no way to fight them," Zander said soberly.

"I'm saying that whether gods are real or not, there's no point in trying to fight them by simply not believing in them. That's just childish, blankets over the head nonsense. If you think gods aren't real, you stop wasting time thinking about them altogether and deal with the real-world consequences of people's belief in them on a case-by-case basis, because there will always be people who believe in gods, for whatever reason seems good to them, and you'll never change that with logic or science or anything else. If you think gods are real, you either accept that they exist and you can't do anything about it, or you fight them in the same way, by dealing with their worshippers when they do things that you find wrong. One thing is certain. If gods are real, there's nothing anyone on any world can do to take them on directly. You just haven't got the technology yet."

"And when we do have the technology?"

"Then you'll be gods yourselves," Powers said seriously, "and you can do what you like. You might find, though, when you get to that point, that you feel rather...differently."

"'The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.'" Zander delivered the quote on cue, wearily.

"Old Lord Acton wasn't entirely wrong," Powers said.

"Well, I don't accept it." Rob leapt to his feet and strode up and down waving his arms. "You talk about it in the abstract--you talk about everything in the abstract, like it's a-a-a game or something, but I've seen people hurt, my friends hurt, by people who believed God was telling them to do it. Case by case isn't good enough. We have to root out the cause, destroy this ridiculous, infantile belief people have in some sort of being watching from on high, just waiting to swoop down and AAAAIGH!!"

"Hey!" Powers yelled. "Hey, bring him back at once! That's escalation! I'm the stooge in this act! He's audience! You don't mess with the audience!"

"Deus ex machina," Zander murmured, peering up into the shadows above. "Well, as religious experiences go, this seems relatively mild. He should be none the worse for it. And it stopped the argument."

"Doomed idealism's all very well," Powers agreed, "but there really is no arguing with it. Mind you, if I had a quid for every time someone said 'it's not good enough' when it, whatever it was, was all there ever was or could be--"

"You'd have an awful lot of chewing tobacco," Zander finished. "Ah, I can hear him laughing. I think he's got over the shock. Let him down gently," he called up into the heights. "And Powers is right, don't do it again. Otherwise I shall have to bring in the meerkats."

Powers winced.