“I suggest that it is simply not possible for a modern Christian, even a fundamentalist, to believe the cosmos to have the exact physical structure that biblical authors believed it to have. By this I mean that it is not really possible, short of severe self-delusion, to believe that the earth is flat, that the sky is not a solid dome beyond the stars with waters of chaos above it, that beneath the ground is the world of the dead, that heaven is literally up, and that the stars are divine beings.

I know that many Christians claim that the Bible is scientifically accurate on all matters on which it touches and that they are prepared to reject the findings of mainstream science to hold onto a seven-day creation that took place six to ten tousand years ago, but, as we have seen, this does not go nearly far enough. If fundamentalists really were to have the courage of their convictions then we would see membership of the Flat Earth Society boosted significantly. What happens instead is that this is a bridge too far, even for hard-line fundamentalists, and biblical texts are thus reinterpreted to fit with modern cosmology. For instance, Isaiah's phrase "the circle of the earth" (Isa 40:22) is taken as proof that the Bible authors actually believed in a planetary globe - proof, we are told, of its inerrancy. However, in this tour we have seen that such interpretations are implausible.

So I really do not think we can inhabit the biblical cosmos in the same way that ancient Israelites or Second Temple Jews (including the authors of the New Testament) did. The world can never feel the same again after Copernicus. The cosmology of the Bible is ancient and we are not; it's as simple as that.”