© 2001 Ken Glasziou
© 2001 The Brotherhood of Man Library
Science and the Urantia Papers. Inexplicable prophesy and inexplicable errors | Volume 8 - No. 5 — Index | Prophetic Science in the Urantia Papers—Discussion |
“There is a curious parallel history between the histories of black holes and continental drift. Evidence for both was already non-ignorable by 1916, but both ideas were stopped in their tracks for half a century by a resistance bordering on the irrational. . . but [resistance to] both began to crumble around 1960.” (Werner Israel, quoted in Thorne[1])
“. . . disbelief (in continental drift) was so strong that it often bordered on indignation. One of the strongest opponents was the British geophysicist Sir Harold Jeffreys, who spent years attempting to demonstrate that continental drift is impossible because the strength of the mantle should be far greater than any conceivable driving force. . . .It was in North America, however, that opposition to Wegener’s ideas was vigorous to the point of excess and very nearly unanimous. . . .Wegener was attacked from virtually every possible vantage point, his paleontological evidence attributed to land bridges, the similarity of strata on both sides of the Atlantic called into question, the fit of Atlantic shores declared inaccurate, and his very competence doubted.”[2]
The idea of continental drift was mooted in the 19th century and first put forward as a comprehensive theory by Wegener in 1912. It was not well accepted, often being classified as pseudoscience. For example Rollin T. Chamberlin, a leading American geologist, wrote in 1928 just 6 years prior to receipt of the Urantia Papers: “Wegener’s theory in general is of the footless type. . . It plays a game in which there are few restrictive rules. . . ” Chamberlin then listed 18 points that he considered were destructive of the drift hypothesis and began his book with, “Can we call geology a science when there exists such a difference of opinion in fundamental matters as to make it possible for such a theory to run wild?”
In the light of such opposition one must wonder what would have caused the authors of the Urantia Papers to base the whole of their report on the evolution of continents and life on this planet upon the truth of continental drift—unless they had access to some special source of knowledge.
Moreover they were not simply following Wegener’s version of drift. Wegener began his story with a single continent that he called Pangea that commenced to break up in the order of 200 million years ago. The story presented in the Papers commenced with a single continent that commenced to break up 750 million years ago. Wegener’s views prevailed until around 1970 when some geologists began to voice a different opinion which is reported in a book entitled “Genesis” published in 1982[2:1]. In this, it was proposed that there may have been a pre-existing continent, a Pangea 1, roughly 600 million years ago that had broken up into four new continents by about 450 million years ago, at the end of the Ordovician age. Then, about 250 million years later, these continents were thought to have converged to form Pangea 2 which quickly broke up again as proposed by Wegener. Variations on this theme have continued to appear and were pulled together in 1995 in a review article[3] proposing the breakup of a pre-Cambrian supercontinent named Rodinia around 750 million years—exactly coincidental with the time given by the Urantia Papers.
There are other features of the Urantia Papers’ story of our planet that are quite remarkable. Remembering the fierce opposition against continental drift that existed during time of receipt and publication of the Papers, their authors nevertheless associated the collision of the continental land mass and the oceanic floor with the formation of “the whole vast north and south mountain range extending from Alaska down through Mexico to Cape Horn.” (Paper 60, Section 3) The collision of tectonic plates and subduction of the oceanic plate is now accepted as a major component of the forces involved in mountain building in areas like the west coast of the Americas.
The Papers also tell of features such as land bridges connecting Australia, and the Antarctic continent with South America and South Africa that would have allowed primitive placental (marsupial) animals that flourished 50 million years ago to move between these continents.
The presence of marsupial fossils in Oligocene strata (about 35 to 40 million years old) in Australia and in America in the Cretaceous strata dating as far back as 65 million years ago, together with the recent discovery of marsupial fossils on Seymour Island in Antarctica provide remarkable evidence for statements (Paper 61, Sections 1,2 ) about the ancestors of Australia’s kangaroos and the land bridges of 35 to 45 million years ago. Yet when the Papers were written in the 1930’s, geologists or paleontologists who supported the notion of continental drift would have been labeled as mavericks. All of which raises the question of why the authors of the Urantia Papers would have written such material except they possessed knowledge unavailable on Urantia.
At the beginning of Paper 57 in which the breakup up of a supercontinent and continental drift is introduced, there is another remarkable snippet of information. In this Paper we are told that the beginning of our solar system occurred 4.5 billion years ago. Until the mid-1950’s no firm evidence existed that could confirm or deny such a statement, a range being given from about six thousand years by Creationists to six billion or more by cosmologists. The first radiometric dating of meteoric material was performed in 1955 by Claire Patterson who studied the lead isotopes in chondritic meteorite material. The result indicated an age of about 4.5 billion years as given in the Urantia Paper of 1934/5. This remains as the accepted age at 2001 AD.
There is absolutely no way that in 1955, the printing plates of The Urantia Book (published 1955) could have been altered to accommodate Dr Patterson’s work. For starters it would have been foolish to do so for there was no certainty that the dating of a chondritic meteorite gave the correct age for the solar system. Secondly, the making of a metal printing plate was a time consuming and expensive business. For The Urantia Book, each circular plate was cast so as to turn out sixteen pages with each turn of the press.[4] Lastly, in 1955 a considerable group of people was both studying the Papers and checking for possible typographic errors that could be corrected in a later printing. It would have been impossible to accomplish such a change in secrecy. At this stage of proceedings any attempt to make substantial changes to the plates would have resulted in a furor and would have been well known throughout the Urantia movement. . .
So much of the story of our planet in the Urantia Papers relates to the story of continental drift that if the drift story had turned out to be a fiasco, The Urantia Book would surely have disappeared from circulation many years ago. Except that they had access to privileged information, the authors went out on a long light limb when they opted for continental drift—and they embraced it so whole heartedly that they located themselves at the very end of that limb.
However, a word of caution. The chances of correct guessing for this small selection of prophetic material are so slight that only a totally shut mind would reject their significance. But the reason for including prophetic material is not so obvious. In terms of what was known in the 1930’s period, the cosmology content of the Papers was adequate and provided for a conceptual “universe frame in which to think” (Paper 115, Section 1) that was suitable for the next thirty or so years. Today it is outdated and will become increasingly so. The good side of this is that it will ensure a label of infallibility and authority cannot be sustained—for even those with a reasonable level of high school education will recognize the outdated state of its cosmology. The bad side is that many may turn away from the book without giving it due consideration and thus miss out on its genuinely valuable religious and spiritual contributions.
So why was prophetic material included? The most likely reason appears to be that once the cosmology became outdated and recognized as such, those who might otherwise reject the work without ever looking for themselves nevertheless could be provided with an incentive to ignore the error and read the Papers for what they were intended—their intrinsic spiritual and religious value.
Article in Innerface International: https://urantia-book.org/archive/newsletters/innerface/vol8_5/page7.html
Interactive web app showing Earth from 750 My to today: https://dinosaurpictures.org/ancient-earth/
Science and the Urantia Papers. Inexplicable prophesy and inexplicable errors | Volume 8 - No. 5 — Index | Prophetic Science in the Urantia Papers—Discussion |