Joseph Smith and the Plurality of Worlds

I'm currently reading The Science of Liberty, by Timothy Ferris, the thesis of which is that science was the driving force behind the Enlightenment and the formation of liberal democracies. A few days ago I came across a passage that fits perfectly in the series of posts I've been doing on prophets and science. The context is the early life of Thomas Paine and his interest in science. He attended lectures by two science popularizers and purchased from one of them a set of globes. (Other items for sale included telescopes, microscopes, etc.)

Displaying a pair of globes--one celestial, the other terrestrial--in your home signified that you were up on the latest scientific developments and knew about "the plurality of worlds," the theory that the earth was just one among many inhabited planets.

This is followed by a few passages from Paine's The Age of Reason asserting that the universe is filled with inhabited worlds. This pamphlet was published a decade before Joseph Smith was born, and Paine's purchase of the globes was more than half a century before Joseph would write the words "worlds without number have I created" and "were it possible that man could number the particles of the earth, yea, millions of earths like this, it would not be a beginning to the number of thy creations," in his revision of Genesis that we call the Book of Moses. It turns out that the concept of the plurality of worlds was not uncommon in the writings of thinkers in the century preceding Joseph. Deist critics of religion such as Thomas Paine used it to ridicule Christianity, while defenders invoked it as evidence of God's majesty.

That Joseph was not alone in contemplating a universe filled with inhabited worlds is lightly touched on in the Encyclopedia of Mormonism entry for "Worlds."

Joseph Smith's version of pluralism shared some similarities with ideas of his religious contemporaries and of modern science....Like contemporary pluralists, Joseph Smith's system implied innumerable stellar systems with inhabited planets.

The correspondence between Joseph's revelations and the surrounding culture on this point has not gone unnoticed, with critics charging that Joseph's revelations were little more than re-packaging of ideas accessible to him, and defenders emphasizing differences in content or use.

I don't want to belabor the point, so I will quickly highlight Erich Robert Paul's 1986 Dialogue article, "Joseph Smith and the Plurality of Worlds Idea" [PDF]. This article, which is also cited in the EoM article, provides historical background on the concept and places Joseph's revelations in that larger context.

Finally, I should point out that, strictly speaking, from a scientific point of view the question of whether life forms--especially intelligent ones--inhabit other planets in this universe is still open, since none have yet been discovered and good arguments can be made both for and against the proposition.

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