Cosmos? Who needs it, we have the universe!

The final aspect of the shift involves our view of the natural world; in the premodern imaginary, we live in a cosmos, an ordered whole where the “natural” world hangs within its beyond (p. 60). It's as if the universe has layers, and we are always folded into the middle. If the premodern self is “porous,” so too is the premodem cosmos.

In contrast to this, the modern imaginary finds us in a “universe” that has its own kind of order, but it is an immanent order of natural laws rather than any sort of hierarchy of being (p. 60).… At this point, we simply recognize that the shift from cosmos to universe — from “creation” to “nature” — makes it possible to now imagine meaning and significance as contained within the universe itself, an autonomous, independent “meaning” that is unhooked from any sort of transcendent dependence.—James K. A. Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular, 34–35