Our new understanding of the universe requires a new moral climate. The ancient Hebrews thought the earth was like a saucer floating on the “deep” with an inverted bowl over it, the firmament, that separated the “water above from the waters below.”
There are those who say the Bible is literally true so they must still believe in the saucer and bowl idea. Many of those who have given it some further thought might say it is like a big clock, or an amazing machine because “since Newton and the age of the machine, physics and industrialism have trained modern humans to think of the earth as a machine that runs according to fixed laws that we humans cannot influence.”
But such an image is just as inappropriate as the saucer and bowl one because we now know there is nothing fixed at all in the universe. We have heard of the big bang theory, but many of us of us have not understood the implications.
Michael Northcote believes there is a need for a “new moral climate”