Thomas Berry is a Roman Catholic priest, a monk and a college teacher of the history of religions who became, in later life, a committed ecologist. We need the sun, the moon, the stars, the rivers, the mountains and the trees, the flowers, the birds, the song of the birds, the fish of the sea, to evoke a world of mystery, to evoke the sacred. It gives us a sense of awe. This is a response to the cosmic liturgy, since the universe itself is a sacred liturgy.
Humans become religious by joining the religion of the universe.
Apart from that, our souls shrivel and our imagination is dulled. If we lived on the moon our imagination would be as flat as the moon, our emotions would be dull, and our sense of the divine would reflect the lunar landscape. The experience of the beauty and grandeur of the outer world is totally necessary. Every single creature is full of God, and is a book about God. Every creature is a word of God.