© 1998 Ken Glasziou
© 1998 The Brotherhood of Man Library
| Are the Urantia Papers demonstrably of super-human origin? | Volume 5 - No. 7 — Index | Some Early History |
In some ways it seems unfortunate that an alternative name for The Urantia Book is “The Fifth Epochal Revelation.” It is the effect of this acquired name that has caused so many readers to attribute a fundamentalist-style “absolute and infallible truth” status to its content.
The authors themselves make no such claim. And nowhere do they use the term “the Fifth Epochal Revelation.” The closest comment is that among many events of religious revelation, “only five are of epochal significance.” Of these, the life and teaching of Jesus could perhaps aspire to divine authority but, even for that, we have only records that, one way or another, have felt the touch of human hands.
The revelators have applied themselves with some diligence to the task of avoiding the problems that Christianity has faced through the imposition of a divine dictation theory to biblical writings. For example, they state, “The creature may crave infallibility but only the Creators possess it.”
None of the authors of the Urantia Papers have a claim to “Creator” status. Therefore none can be infallible, something they themselves freely acknowledge. In fact they leave no room for doubt as to what they believe about their own work. “Let it be made clear that revelations are not necessarily inspired.” (UB 101:4.2)
While it is obviously true that many parts of this book are not of “inspired” status, there are also many sections that have the ring of divine truth. But the proof of divine truth is entirely a personal experience.
“Reason is the proof of science, faith the proof of religion, logic the proof of philosophy, but revelation is validated only by human experience.” (UB 101:2.8)
Another important statement from the Papers is:
“The existence of God is utterly beyond all possibility of demonstration except for the contact between God-consciousness of the human mind and the God-presence. . . that indwells the mortal intellect and is bestowed upon man as the free gift of the Universal Father.” (UB 1:2.8)
A stated purpose for the Urantia Papers is to “synthesize the apparently divergent sciences of nature and the theology of religion into a consistent and logical universe philosophy.” (UB 101:2.1) This would be an impossible task if the authors were constrained by having to provide infallible truth and, at the same time, comply with a mandate that proscribed the impartation of unearned knowledge. And they even state their cosmology is “not inspired.” (UB 101:4.2)
When the Urantia Papers were received in the mid- 1930’s, traditional cosmology dealt with features of creation as a whole. It could include speculative philosophy in its widest sense.[^1] In its current usage, the meaning of the term has narrowed to astrophysics and astronomy. But it is used in the Urantia Papers in its traditional sense, and covers every aspect of creation.
A little thought is all that is necessary to realize that a consistent philosophy, or cosmology, does not need to be infallible truth in order to be enormously beneficial. Philosophical and cosmological truth may often be more useful and more comprehensible if conveyed under the guise of myth, parable, or allegory.
Some books that we read may stimulate an urge to read them again and again in order to gain their full benefit. I’ve always been amazed by how much my first assessment of any book declined on even the second reading. Only rarely have I undertaken a third full reading of any book.
There are a few exceptions. One came about through my acquisition of a Bible that had the spoken word of Jesus from the Gospels picked out in red print. I found I could read substantial amounts of both Matthew’s and John’s Gospels without ever tiring of them.
The other exception is certain Papers from The Urantia Book. I’ve been reading these on a daily basis for going on thirty years—and never expect to master what they contain, nor to tire of trying.
I feel that I am a highly critical kind of person. During my fifteen years as head of a research laboratory, I used to tell new graduates who came to work with us that their productivity would be hamstrung until they learned to question all they ever thought they knew.
I had tackled the Bible and The Urantia Book with this approach, and on the assumption that you don’t discover truth—you feel it.
My science career was dominantly in the field of biochemistry. Theoretical physics and mathematics are fields where a feeling for truth is ultra important. Truth has a smell all of its own. Mathematicians and physicists pluck truth out of the depths of their minds. Biochemists, though they may smell truth, have to work empirically—sift the data, make a hypothesis, do an experiment, improve the hypothesis, and so on and so on. It can be tedious stuff.
One of the truly great geniuses of our century was a mathematician named Kurt Godel. He “proved” that there is no set of computational rules that can characterize the properties of natural numbers. Put another way, it means that our number system cannot be shown to be self-consistent. Surely then our implicit trust in numbers is because they have the smell of truth.
Roger Penrose, another maths-physics genius of this century used the following illustration[^2] that indicates mind is something very special. Draw on a blackboard a variety of objects in groups such as two cups, five pencils, three knives, etc., set any number of computers in front of the blackboard, and switch them on. You can leave them there for weeks, months, even years and they will be quite unable to devise the set of natural numbers from any set of rules programmed into them—and certainly not from their own intuition. But show the same set to small children and most will abstract the concept of natural numbers, even though they had no prior training in mathematics!
It does not require genius class thinking to realize there is something very special about human minds. I’m quite sure that one of its specialties is the ability to intuitively feel truth. Of course it is possible to train and develop this gift. And the more accurate knowledge that we accumulate, the better equipped we ought to be to discern deeper and deeper truth.
We all have the gift for feeling truth—regardless of higher education and intellectual ability. I think many animals may have it in some more primitive way. Did you know that bees can count?[^5]
Truth discernment is the gift we must use to help us evaluate the Urantia Papers. Clearing our minds from preconceived prejudices can be a great help.
It is true that life’s circumstances may have preconditioned some people to be gullible when they first find The Urantia Book. Having been told that the Papers have celestial authors, and given some vivid propaganda about their revelatory status—perhaps accompanied by a need to make sense of their lives—some may then be ready to believe something that they feel will help to solve their personal problems. Time often makes such people very much more discerning, particularly as they develop their feel for truth.
For lots of us, our introduction to the Papers comes about in the absence of any apparent psychological need for a lifesaving prop. Perhaps we were voracious consumers of written material, or we may simply have been seekers after truth. Or perhaps some random combination of circumstances may have caused us to start browsing through them.
Whatever it is that starts our quest, we are quickly confronted with the fact that there are more than two thousand pages in The Urantia Book, most of them requiring attentive concentration in order to comprehend their meaning. So perhaps some external help may assist in the quest for truth.
In illustration that prior knowledge can be a help for comprehension of the Urantia Papers, let me point out that the mandate under which their authors had to work is not discussed in any depth until just past the half way point in the book. And the mandate was such as to ensure that the cosmology of the Papers would be quickly outdated.
It is easy to miss two important statements, one near the beginning, the other in the last third of the book, that inform us that human sources, about three thousand of them, have been used whenever these sources have described some concept or idea reasonably well.
Those who had to discover these points for themselves probably experienced much frustration in their journey of discovery. But my own experience has brought about a judgment that can be summarized in these terms: If these Papers are not true, then they ought to be true.
A very large number of Christians have, through the ages, arrived at concepts about God and about Jesus, his life and teachings, that are similar to those depicted in the Urantia Papers. But it usually takes a life-time of study and experience to reach that state. The Urantia Papers can greatly help anyone to simplify and shorten their journey. And that can occur regardless of any belief held about their authorship and revelatory status.
| Are the Urantia Papers demonstrably of super-human origin? | Volume 5 - No. 7 — Index | Some Early History |