© 1992 Ken Glasziou
© 1992 ANZURA, Australia & New Zealand Urantia Association
| In The Real World, Inequality Is Only Natural | Vol 13 No 2 100th Issue — Index | A Vision For The Future |
by Ken Glasziou, Maleny, Queensland
¶ Introduction
The URANTIA Book claims that it is a revelation given to we mortals by celestial and other-than-human beings. When first introduced to this book, I assumed that it had been written by a committee of well-meaning academics on a save-the-world mission. On becoming more familiar with the content of the book, I was impressed by the quality and consistency of its message, but also noticed material of a scientific nature that could only have been guesswork at the time of receipt of the Papers. It did not make sense that a group of obviously knowledgeable and talented authors would risk jeopardizing acceptance of their work by including contentious prophetic material, particularly as the book could easily have earned recognition as a philosophical and religious work of great merit.
There have been suggestions that various single authors wrote The URANTIA Book — Dr W. Sadler, Wilfred Kellogg, Carl Jung, H.G. Wells, and Robert Millikin being among those named.
There are many ways by which investigators have attempted to verify or deny authorship of documents. For example the Epistles attributed to Paul in the New Testament have long been a subject for investigation. One of the methods for investigating authorship is based on style analysis, as authors tend to stamp their personal idiosyncrasies on documents that they produce. A method that was used for the Pauline letters was based on the number of sentences having zero, one, two,…occurrences of ‘kai’ (Morton, 1965).
Recent advances in computer technology and the existence of excellent search programs have made possible the investigation of even lengthy works. The methods chosen by this author to investigate The URANTIA Book were largely dictated by the convenience in which facts of a statistical nature could be extracted from a FolioViews database for the book.
Initially a very simple approach was made in which it was attempted to demonstrate that there was a style difference between Parts 1,2, and 3, taken as a whole, and Part 4. The reason for this choice was that the Papers in Parts 1-3 were all stated to be written by celestial beings whereas the authors for Part 4 (the midwayers) are stated to be terrestrial. When this analysis indicated that the two components were indeed significantly different, the work was extended to test each of the parts separately, and then some individual authors, or groups of authors, were selected for investigation.
The method chosen was to determine the number of occasions sentences commenced with a particular marker word, a method used by Mosteller and Wallace. Those chosen were: ‘how’, ‘when’, ‘and’, ‘but’, ‘this’. A second study also used marker words described by Mosteller and Wallace as ‘function’ words, such as ‘also’, ‘an’, ‘by’, etc.
¶ Method
The FolioViews search program, in combination with a URANTIA Book database, will give the frequency of occurrence and position of any individual word in the whole book, the frequency and location of combinations of words in a paragraph, or the frequency and location of phrases in paragraphs. For example to find a phrase such as “son of God”, the words must be enclosed in inverted commas otherwise one obtains paragraphs in which all three words occur, but not necessarily as a phrase. This same method can also be used to obtain the frequency and position of occurrence of words that start or end a sentence. To locate sentences commencing with a particular word, one searches for a period followed by a space then the required word. To find sentences that end with a particular word, the word followed by a period is adequate. In both cases the search phrase must be in inverted commas.
Recent advances in computer technology and the existence of excellent search programs have made possible the investigation of even lengthy works. The methods chosen by this author to investigate The URANTIA Book were largely dictated by the convenience in which facts of a statistical nature could be extracted from a FolioViews database for the book.
For the purposes of a first investigation, the papers were split as follows: Foreword (pages 1-20); Part 1 (pages 21-354); Divine Counselor Papers (pages 21-107); Part 2 (pages 357-648); Part 3 (pages 651-1307); Life Carrier Papers (pages 651-740); Melchizedek Papers (pages 1003-1175); Solitary Messenger Papers (pages 1176-1240); Papers 120 and 121 (pages 1308-1331); and Part 4, The Jesus Papers (pages 1332-2097). The Chi Square distribution was used for all statistical testing. The Table shows the words that were used as those beginning sentences and the various comparisons that were made, together with the Chi Squared estimate of probability that the parameters tested were truly independent.
It has been proposed that Dr Sadler was capable of writing the scientific, geological and biological material describing the early history of the earth (Papers 57-62), the Papers providing an in-depth cover on religion and theology (Part 1 and Papers 99-107), as well as Part IV (The Life and Teachings of Jesus). A second study was undertaken to investigate whether these papers were indeed written by a single author. In this case, marker words suggested by Mosteller and Wallace such as ‘an’, ‘also’, ‘upon’, ‘by’, ‘there’, ‘this’, etc., were used to test this hypothesis following procedures suggested by Kenny (1982).
A third study was conducted on the only available sample of Dr Sadler’s writings, a 1946 public lecture of about 6000 words entitled “The Evolution of the Soul.” This was scanned onto computer disk and converted to both Word Perfect and a FolioViews database. Slightly more than 50% of the text consisted of verbatim quotations from The URANTIA Book. This was separated from the remainder of the text and analyzed using a style analysis computer program (Readability Plus).
¶ Conclusions
When tested by use of the Chi Square distribution, the hypothesis that the Foreword, and Parts 1, 2, 3, and 4 are all distinct works was highly significant for the words ‘when’, ‘and’, ‘but’, and ‘this’. No sentences in the Foreword commenced with the word ‘how’, but the use of sentences commencing with this word indicated that Parts 1, 2 and 3 were distinctly different from Part 4.
Parts of the book attributed to Divine Counselors, Life Carriers, Melchizedeks, and a Solitary Messenger were also found to be distinguishable. The results presented in the Table indicate that there may have been in excess of nine authors of The URANTIA Book.
The second study showed that Papers 57-62 differ from Papers 99-107 (P = 0.01); Papers 57-62 differ from Part 4 (P = 0.001); Papers 99-107 differ from Part 1 (P = 0.01); and Papers 99-107 differ from Part 4 (P = 0.001). Hence the postulate of single authorship for combinations of this material is not supported.
The third study on Dr Sadler’s published lecture “The Evolution of the Soul”, of which more than half is verbatim quotations from The URANTIA Book, clearly differentiated two distinct writing styles on the basis of sentence structure (P = 0.005), sentence length (P = 0.05), and the Flesch Reading Ease Index (P = 0.05).
Besides indicating that Dr Sadler did not write The URANTIA Book, the results of this investigation add another dimension to the task of objectifying claims that human agencies may have compiled the URANTIA Book. It now becomes necessary also to offer a rational explanation on how the involvement of so many outstanding individuals in such a major task could have been kept totally secret over a period exceeding fifty years. A further problem is how the remarkable consistency of the material found in this book could be maintained by multiple human authors (or even a single author) working well before the days when computer search programs and data bases became available.
Reference: Anthony Kenny (1982), “The Computation of Style.” (Pergamon Press Ltd.)
Table. A comparison of writing styles in different sections of The URANTIA Book
| First word of sentence |
Total occurrences |
Comparison made |
Level of Signicance (%) |
|---|---|---|---|
| How | 29 | Part 4 and Parts 1,2,30. | 0.1 |
| When | 537 | Part 4 and Parts 1,2,3 | 0.1 |
| “ | “ | Divine Counselor and whole book | 0.1 |
| “ | “ | Life carrier and whole book | 1.0 |
| “ | “ | Melchizedek and whole book | 0.1 |
| And | 1959 | Foreword and Divine Counselor | 0.1 |
| “ | “ | Foreword and whole book | 0.1 |
| “ | “ | Foreword and Part | 1.0 |
| “ | “ | Part 1 and whole book | 0.1 |
| “ | “ | Part 2 and whole book | 0.1 |
| “ | “ | Solitary Messenger and whole book | 5.0 |
| “ | “ | Solitary Messenger and Part 3 | 5.0 |
| “ | “ | Part 4 and whole book | 0.1 |
| “ | “ | Part 4 and Parts 1,2,3 | 0.1 |
| For | 157 | Part 4 and Parts 1,2,3 | 0.1 |
| “ | “ | Life carrier and Part 3 | 1.0 |
| But | 1398 | Part 3 and Parts 1,2,4 | 0.1 |
| “ | “ | Life Carrier and parts 1,2,4 | 1.0 |
| “ | “ | Melchizedek and Parts 1,2,4 | 0.1 |
| “ | “ | Solitary Messenger and Parts 1,2,4 | 5.0 |
| “ | “ | Part 4 and Parts 1,2 | 0.1 |
| “ | “ | Part 4 and Part 1 | 0.1 |
| “ | “ | Part 4 and Part 2 | 0.1 |
| “ | “ | Part 4 and Part 3 | 0.1 |
| This | 1079 | Foreword and whole book | 1.0 |
| “ | “ | Life Carrier and whole book | 0.1 |
| “ | “ | Foreword and Divine Counselor | 0.1 |
| In The Real World, Inequality Is Only Natural | Vol 13 No 2 100th Issue — Index | A Vision For The Future |