Since then no part of our earth is left unoccupied, why is it to be supposed that the immensity of space is a naked void, lying in eternal waste? There is room for millions of worlds as large or larger than ours, and each of them millions of miles apart from each other...
From whence, From whence, then, could arise the solitary and strange conceit that the Almighty, who had millions of worlds equally dependent on his protection, should quit the care of all the rest, and come to die in our world because, they say, one man and one woman ate an apple? And, on the other hand, are we to suppose that every world in the boundless creation had an Eve, an apple, a serpent, and a redeemer? In this case, the person who is irreverently called the Son of God, and sometimes God himself, would have nothing else to do than to travel from world to world, in an endless succession of death, with scarcely a momentary interval of life.
Age of Reason
Paine is obviously being ironic here, but the similarity to Joseph Smith's cosmology is striking. It should be remembered that (according to Lucy) Asael evidently gave his son Joseph Sr. a copy of Paine's book well before the Book of Mormon was translated. It was in the family, then, and the young prophet could very easily have read it. I find it interesting, also, how Mormon cosmology resolves this problem. If I understand correctly, every world is said to have "an Eve, an apple, a serpent," but when Christ died on our world he died for all of them. Is that accurate? (I'm working off memory here, so it may not be. But I'd think it would have to be, since at the resurrection Jesus got an exalted body.) Joseph Smith thereby avoids the problem of Jesus wandering endlessly from world to world dying over and over, but doesn't avoid the problem of "the strange and solitary conceit" that makes our world the first or the best of all our Father's worlds.
Paine also makes some fascinating remarks about fixed stars and the revolutionary motion of the various worlds. Paine argues that "all our knowledge of science is derived from the revolutions" of the various worlds, and muses that the more of the universe we contemplate, the smarter and happier we are. This is why God made a plurality of worlds rather than a single really big world: the revolutions of the worlds are the "school of science". While Joseph Smith obviously does not handle revolutions in exactly the same way, I think it's interesting that they-- along with the "fixed stars"-- are one of the key features he highlights in the Book of Abraham.
-Chris