© 2004 Ken Glasziou
© 2004 The Brotherhood of Man Library
Please Note
This and the following issue of Innerface consists of a discussion of both the prophetic material In the Urantia revelation and its many apparent errors in the scientific and historic components of its text.
The words, ‘apparent errors’ are used in recognition that we mortals know nothing with absolute certainty. However errors in simple arithmetic are difficult to argue with and for those who hold to the concept that a revelation must be infallible, attention is drawn to the revelators. assertion that during their initial growth period, our moon and the earth remained at much the same size until the earth was one fifth its present mass—and that made the moon 16 times more massive than it now is. Moreover, the Appollo missions brought back much evidence that is quite incompatible with the revelators account.
But the purpose for this presentation is not to convince committed fundamentalists of their wrongness. Rather it is to help new readers of the revelation to understand that the authors themselves asserted that not only this but any revelation provided to mortals anywhere, is partial and incomplete, and even that “this cosmology is not inspired.” Quotations from the book confirming these assertions are provided.
Have you ever realised that your God is too small? Think on this. Dotted over the night sky at a distance of about 8 billion light-years or more, are curious objects called quasars. They appear to be associated with colliding galaxies or colliding black holes. A single quasar may shine with the blinding light of 10 thousand billion ordinary suns. What on earth can they really be? What unimaginable event does such a release of energy herald?
This work discusses error and prophecy in the Urantia Papers. Its purpose is to put them in their right place. If the revelators used them, they must have had good reason. What could it be? Well certainly to prevent us from messing up their true purposes. Perhaps there could be no other.
If you find yourself unable to cope with a few harmless errors–included with a revelation for the purpose of diverting you from sabotaging its real purpose–then your God is certainly by far too small. Ask yourself did the material that bothers you have any conceivable spiritual value? If not then it was doomed to die with your brain–which may be indicative of its real importance.
“Only those human experiences of spiritual value survive–your past life and its memories, having neither spiritual meaning nor eternity value, will perish with the human brain.”
Your spirituality is the measure of your nearness to God. And so surely the true purpose of the revelators in giving us the Urantia Papers would have been to increase our spirituality. That means increasing our love for God and for one another.
For nigh on thirty years or more after publication of the Papers almost all its readers believed firmly in their infallibility. Many still cling to this belief, regardless of how convincing the contrary evidence may be. One conspicuous thing among those early readers that persists to this day, is that, as a group and in terms of their spirituality, they do not stand out from the average church-going Christian.
So why did we need a 2000 page revelation? To make us better scientists, accurate historians, accomplished theologians? Is that what Jesus did? If we go to the conversations between Jesus and Immanuel just prior to Jesus’ incarnation, we find Immanuel saying:
“Your great mission…to live a life wholeheartedly motivated to do the will of your Paradise Father, thus to reveal God, your Father, in the flesh and especially to the creatures of the flesh….the achievement of God seeking man and finding him and the phenomenon of man seeking God and finding him… Exhibit in your one short life in the flesh, as it has never before been seen…, the transcendent possibilities attainable by a God-knowing human during the short career of mortal existence.” (UB 120:2.8)
This presentation is in two parts–the first gives a short introduction to historical aspects of how these Papers came about then covers some of the prophetic material. The second part is about the error component.
For the first thirty years of its shelf life prophecy, or error in The Urantia Book was not an issue. But then a handful of readers began to ask questions. Prior to this time both types of material were in the exclusive possession of ‘the experts.’ But then the effects of the knowledge explosion began to leak to the general public arena. Parallel with this, and due to extraordinary technological advances, was an explosion in the accuracy by which measurements could be made. The results are twofold–sheer wonderment for some of the prophetic knowledge contained in the Papers and sheer puzzlement about the error content that suddenly became exposed.
Items that produce true wonderment if read and digested thoroughly are those covering the discovery of the radii of the electron and proton, another being confirmation that the neutrino exists and truly is released in vast quantities during the explosion phase of neutron star formation. For anybody with a trenchancy for appraising probabilities, the careful study of these cases to assess the chances of correctly guessing the answers is likely to induce the feeling that, at the time of writing, no human author had the knowledge to do so.
Perhaps to comply with the universe dictum that providing us with unearned knowledge is forbidden, in both these cases the revelators quoted almost word for word from published papers. In the electron and proton radii case they made subtle alterations to the text of the quotes that vastly altered the answers obtained–but were not confirmable as correct until the 1990’s period. In the neutrino case, the authors of the original paper betrayed the fact they did not believe their own speculation, and, in fact, favored a quite different outcome. But, after a lapse of many years, it was their highly speculative suggestion, the one chosen by the revelators, which turned out to be correct.
Wonderment also comes if we read the Book’s account of the early parallel growth of the Earth and its Moon through an accretion process and, on checking the sums, we discover that the revelators’ account has the Moon attain a mass 16 times its present size. Curiously it took almost fifty years before anyone even noticed this obvious error. Such was the faith of readers in the infallibility of heavenly sources–and this despite the authors’ own denials:
“Let it be made clear that revelations are not necessarily inspired. The cosmology of these revelations is not inspired.” (UB 101:4.2)
[Note: In the 1930’s, the word “cosmology” still retained its traditional connotation as a branch of metaphysics dealing with features of the world as a whole–including, for example, St Thomas Aquinas’ famous cosmological argument–see Oxford University Press, Oxford Companion to Philosophy.]
But no revelation short of the attainment of the Universal Father can ever be complete. All other celestial ministrations are no more than partial, transient, and practically adapted to local conditions in time and space. While such admissions as this may possibly detract from the immediate force and authority of all revelations, the time has arrived on Urantia when it is advisable to make such frank statements, even at the risk of weakening the future influence and authority of this, the most recent of the revelations of truth to the mortal races of Urantia. (UB 92:4.9)
It’s never too late to be shat you might become!
George Eliot