ABSTRACT
Implicit in the previous chapters is the religious notion that the astronomical ‘heavens’ above the earth observed and described by Copernicus were the visible indicator of a theological ‘heaven’ beyond them: one in which God dwells. While the present Hubble perspective on the universe takes us far beyond that of Copernicus, it is still the case that ‘heaven’, understood as a place beyond the visible universe, inhabited by God, plays an important role in religious discourse and in western cultural imagination generally.
