“If you stepped into a world where matches failed to strike, you would cease to exist as organized matter.”
Okay, I can see your point here—if I ask you to imagine being transported to another planet where things are kind of the same, except the matches don’t work, you’d be justified in being skeptical. I always worried about this when I watched Star Trek—how come the crew never accidentally vaporized after beaming down to a planet with just slightly different local laws of physics?
But mythology is different from science fiction—mythology is populated by gods, where gods are defined not just as ‘so much more powerful than we humans that we perceive them as god-like,’ but as actual, omnipotent gods, capable of manipulating or simply disregarding ‘laws’ of the physical universe. If you visit this world, you’d best check any thoughts of a ‘tighly-laced reality’ at the door.
“If you stepped into a world where matches failed to strike, you would cease to exist as organized matter.”
Okay, I can see your point here—if I ask you to imagine being transported to another planet where things are kind of the same, except the matches don’t work, you’d be justified in being skeptical. I always worried about this when I watched Star Trek—how come the crew never accidentally vaporized after beaming down to a planet with just slightly different local laws of physics?
But mythology is different from science fiction—mythology is populated by gods, where gods are defined not just as ‘so much more powerful than we humans that we perceive them as god-like,’ but as actual, omnipotent gods, capable of manipulating or simply disregarding ‘laws’ of the physical universe. If you visit this world, you’d best check any thoughts of a ‘tighly-laced reality’ at the door.