Someone posted the following diagram on Twitter, with a note that it was the Bible's description of the universe:
The problem with taking metaphors too literally is that you fail to see the wood for the trees, and miss what is actually being said. And there is also the danger of reading into a text a lot of things that are not being said.
In my youth there we often used other metaphors for the world (cosmos) we live in. One was "Spaceship Earth". I wonder whether, in about three millennia's time, someone will produce a drawing of whatever their current conception of a spaceship is, and say, in all seriousness, that that is how the ancients of the 20th century pictured the earth?
Another metaphor that I have often used in sermons, is based on a song by the Beatles that was popular about the same time as the "Spaceship Earth" one. I din't know if the Beatles themselves conceived it that way, but I used it in sermons describing the world in the time of Noah: We all live in a Yellow Submarine. Combine the metaphors and you get a submarine capable of travelling in outer space, which, of course, is what the Polaris missiles of those days did.
The point of those metaphors, of course, is that both submarines and spaceships have limited resources and a confined space in which to preserve the life of the occupants. And in the days of Noah, men were filling the earth with violence .in a confined space. Do that in a submarine, and sooner or later an armour-piercing projectile will make a hole in the hull and the waters above the roof and below the floor will come flooding in. Not windows in the firmament, but bullet holes in the hull. The effect is the same. It lets in the water. But it's a metaphor.
If anyone has a problem with biblical literalism, and wants to go beyond it to see the big picture, I recommend reading a book by Anglican bishop John Davies, called Seven Days to Freedom, which gives a better understanding of the creation story in Genesis chapter 1.
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