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1 The Buddhist treatise known as The Lotus of the True Law depicts Bodhisattvas spread in all directions in hundreds of thousands of worlds. This cosmic plenitude of Buddhas-to-be does not seem to play a signifi- cant role in the faith.’ However, the idea that life and intelligence are natural expressions of the universe now is advocated by many scientists. The plurality of inhabited worlds that some took for granted was a belief, not a proven fact. Others assumed that only the Earth is peopled with intelligent beings, establishing a division of opinion that has survived into our own time. Plato, while admitting that the habitability of the planets was an open question, believed that the Earth was unique. Aristotle argued more strenu- ously against plurality. In his geocentric universe, the planets could not be inhabited because they were made of completely different substances than ours; the physical laws governing heaven and Earth were not the same.* This idea that our world and the surrounding cosmos were composed of different elements remained dominant in the Western world until the six- century. Ptolemy (Claudius Ptolemaeus) codified the Aristotelian conception of the Cosmos in his Almagest in the second century A.D. The Ptolemaic uni- verse—a series of concentric spheres centered on the Earth—was closed, its outer boundary a fixed sphere of stars. Although we now think of it as wrong, Ptolemy’s universe was elabo- rately worked out and, by the standards of the time, internally consistent. Ptolemy and his colleagues may not have believed that their model was completely accurate; they may have seen it as a model compatible with observations and as one that provided a basis for reasonable predictions.’ The early Christian church endorsed this geocentric universe. The Aristotelian—Ptolemaic worldview became dogma in Europe for more than 1000 years, as did the presumed centrality and uniqueness of Humankind. Some argue that the Church saw this as only the most plausible of the existing descriptions of the universe, but that subtlety was lost on most people. The church’s domination of the European intellectual world may have delayed the development of Western science for centuries. Not only had rational thought been suppressed by the fifth century, Charles Freeman found, but there had been a substitution for it of mystery, magic, and authority that drew heavily on pagan elements. The mystical theologian The Closed Universe teenth century and was not disproved scientifically until the nineteenth The Closed Universe