Even though the Buddha accepted the idea of rebirth, one could argue that he simply reflected the generally held beliefs of his time. By the time of the Buddha, India had already developed a cosmology which included the ideas of karma, rebirth, and liberatioṇ (A curious twist here is that Westerners often find the idea of rebirth attractive, whereas in Buddhist terms, liberation or nirvana means freedom from the endless round of birth and death.) These ideas were taken for granted, just as we take for granted many scientific views, which, if pressed, we would find hard to prove.
