I've commented before on what I thought of as a medieval (Christian) world view in Wolfe, in that the pain and suffering in this antechamber to eternity is really not that important, it's your attitude while suffering. If you regard the drowning of Urth as an unethical and inefficient use of power, then you must feel the same about the earlier Flood. Severian has to have a belief that this is the only way to do things correctly in the long run, even if he doesn't understand why. Wrt miracles and technology, several people have already made the point that the actual mechanism for the workings of providence is not important (ObSF one might compare Frank Herbert's The Godmakers which has the same mechanism for miraculous powers). And finally, I think that for a long time, there was room in Christian theology/natural philosophy for heirarchies of beings between the level of humans and angels -- one might look to djinns in Islam (who of course can choose to be good Muslims) for a comparison. This comes back to the ``reality'' of the Greek gods, the imperfection of the heirodules etc. I push all these points because I think they influenced the design of this particular universe we're discussing.
David Duffy. ,-_|\
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