06-11-2015, 02:10 PM
As I see it, the 3D world is largely self-reinforcing. As Tan.rar says, physics would be one example of this. But by and large, pretty much everything in the world has as its consequence the reinforcing of everything else. It's one consequence of interconnectedness.
The grand mechanism of systems-within-systems all relying on each other makes it very hard for any of those systems to behave in unexpected ways, in much the same way one particular gear in a car's gearbox isn't likely to suddenly decide it wants to try turning widdershins for awhile. Its interactions with the other gears mean it's only capable of turning one direction, and it would take great effort on the gear's part to shift those interactions.
And basically the more "impossible" an action is, I'd say, the more surrounding/interlocking systems would somehow have to be subverted, moved aside, placated, or otherwise massaged for that action to happen.
Or, like, take one of the most famous miracles in lore, the Parting of the Red Sea. Now, historically, this never happened as far as we know. But say God DID want to drain a sea? Well, the water has to go somewhere. So he'd need to engineer something to happen to the water - say a gigantic hurricane in the middle of the ocean. But hurricanes don't just form. So then he'd need to somehow make that happen, presumably by massaging the weather patterns. Maybe He tells Sol to shift its radiation output to deliberately melt some ice caps, so that decades later, the rapidly-rising heat causes a low-pressure system to form, etc etc... but then, what of the damage to the top-layer ecosystems caused by such actions? Do we just accept that it's going to rain fish for a week thanks to all this mucking about?
Performing actual miracles would be a serious pain in the butt, basically, even if one had the ability.
The grand mechanism of systems-within-systems all relying on each other makes it very hard for any of those systems to behave in unexpected ways, in much the same way one particular gear in a car's gearbox isn't likely to suddenly decide it wants to try turning widdershins for awhile. Its interactions with the other gears mean it's only capable of turning one direction, and it would take great effort on the gear's part to shift those interactions.
And basically the more "impossible" an action is, I'd say, the more surrounding/interlocking systems would somehow have to be subverted, moved aside, placated, or otherwise massaged for that action to happen.
Or, like, take one of the most famous miracles in lore, the Parting of the Red Sea. Now, historically, this never happened as far as we know. But say God DID want to drain a sea? Well, the water has to go somewhere. So he'd need to engineer something to happen to the water - say a gigantic hurricane in the middle of the ocean. But hurricanes don't just form. So then he'd need to somehow make that happen, presumably by massaging the weather patterns. Maybe He tells Sol to shift its radiation output to deliberately melt some ice caps, so that decades later, the rapidly-rising heat causes a low-pressure system to form, etc etc... but then, what of the damage to the top-layer ecosystems caused by such actions? Do we just accept that it's going to rain fish for a week thanks to all this mucking about?
Performing actual miracles would be a serious pain in the butt, basically, even if one had the ability.