
I have to be extremely blunt. What a load of horse manure. Arched "aerial water". So the "arch" opened up and allowed this "aerial water" to flood the earth during the Great Deluge. This is not more than a half step away from Father Paul Robinson's local flood. And your own Googled definition said "solid". Where does the "solid" part come in simply because the globe has some putative "arched" shape? Not that we care about Google. We care about the fact that the Church Fathers all believed that it was solid, that it kept literal waters off the earth, and that when it was "opened" (Sacred Scripture said that windows of the firmament were opened), it allowed water to inundate the earth during the Great Deluge.
I just put up Google's record of the firmament based on what others conceive it to be for readers interest. Perhaps horse manure, but i posted it to show what is already out there.
Now will you show me evidence that all the Fathers believed in a flat Earth. St Thomas Aquinas, in the 13th century, wrote:
“[T]he astronomer and the physicist both may prove the same conclusion—that the earth, for instance, is round: the astronomer by means of mathematics (i.e., abstracting from matter), but the physicist by means of matter itself.”
– Summa Theologica, Question 1, First Article
Hardly a recognition that all the Fathers believed in a flat Earth. If all the Fathers read the Bible revealing the Earth is flat, then that would have been a dogma and Bruno and Galileo would have had that down on their list of heresies. Not a mention of that heresy throughout the history of the Church.
But then I gave my opinion based on Genesis one and two. I gave as an example of the firmament the separating of the waters after Noah's Flood not as causing the firmament as I think you infer. On a global Earth the clouds cover the Earth in an arch, so what is so absurd with that.
As there is not one word of correction of my reading as to what the firmament means in Genesis 1 and 2, I will not change my opinion or belief.