As to “heaven” in 1:14-17, shouldn’t we say, as the illustrators sometimes show, that God dwells in the clouds or among the stars? Is that not a sufficient sense of “heaven”?

Perhaps early theologians thought so, but we now know they would have been mistaken, because the regions above the clouds—outer space, with its planets and stars—are every bit as “fleshly” as the rest of the material creation. It seems to have been thought that the loftier regions were not like “here below,” so it was possible to think of a spiritual heaven as being simply, “up there.” But Copernicus and even more modern astronomy and space exploration have shown that space is material and not particularly holy. Yet we are specifically told that God is “a spirit” (John 4:24). Visions of God on his throne, and surrounded by adoring angels (e.g., Isaiah 6, Ezekiel 1, and Revelation 4), are distinctly otherworldly visions and typically interpreted as somewhat clumsy, metaphorical attempts to describe wholly spiritual visions. So any divine dwelling place cannot reside “at” any particular place “in” this material world.