© 2004 Ken Glasziou
© 2004 The Brotherhood of Man Library
| How far to Andromeda | Volume 11 - No. 4 — Index | The Ridiculous—Passenger Birds and Secondary Midwayers |
¶ Summary
Herein lies a set of errors for which individuals need only simple high school mathematics to check the error content for themselves. And the level of intellect displayed by the authors throughout their book is such that this error content has to be deliberate, thereby demanding we think about why.
“When a religion becomes fundamentalist, it inevitably becomes counter-productive, counter-intuitive, and an impediment to the social and spiritual progress of its adherents.”
This summation has certainly proven itself true for Jewish, Islamic, and Christian fundamentalism–all of which have committed heinous acts of barbarism in the name of their supposed God.
¶ Content
Features of fundamentalism are the assumption of infallibility at the expense of truth-seeking, rigorous indoctrination of potential adherents, and the assumption of authority by the dominant hierarchy.
Physical facts are fairly uniform, but truth is a living and flexible factor in the philosophy of the universe. Evolving personalities are only partially wise and relatively true in their communications. They can be certain only as far as their personal experience extends. (UB 2:7.2)
The revelators of the Urantia Papers would have been well aware of the potential for their revelation to come under the control of those preaching fundamentalism. Thus, they took steps to reduce the risks, among them, these declarations:
It has appeared to be wise from time to time to provide instruction in cosmology. And always has this made trouble for the future. The laws of revelation hamper us greatly by their proscription of the impartation of unearned or premature knowledge. Any cosmology presented as a part of revealed religion is destined to be outgrown in a very short time. (UB 101:4.1)
Mankind should understand that we who participate in the revelation of truth are very rigorously limited by the instructions of our superiors. We are not at liberty to anticipate the scientific discoveries of a thousand years. (UB 101:4.2)
We full well know that, while the historic facts and religious truths of this series of revelatory presentations will stand on the records of the ages to come, within a few short years many of our statements regarding the physical sciences will stand in need of revision in consequence of additional scientific developments and new discoveries. These new developments we even now foresee, but we are forbidden to include such humanly undiscovered facts in the revelatory records. Let it be made clear that revelations are not necessarily inspired. The cosmology of these revelations is not inspired. (UB 101:4.2)
“Partial, incomplete, and evolving intellects would be helpless in the master universe, would be unable to form the first rational thought pattern, were it not for the innate ability of all mind, high or low, to form a universe frame in which to think. If mind cannot fathom conclusions, if it cannot penetrate to true origins, then will such mind unfailingly postulate conclusions and invent origins that it may have a means of logical thought within the frame of these mind-created postulates. And while such universe frames for creature thought are indispensable to rational intellectual operations, they are, without exception, erroneous to a greater or lesser degree.” (UB 115:1.1)
There is, of course, much more. However, a mind that is able to twist these statements to suit the individual’s belief system, will also twist anything else that could be added.
One favored ploy is to cite occasions when science has been wrong in order to justify dismissing all the assertions of science. The fear of dedicated fundamentalists is that the discovery of even a single error in the Urantia Papers would throw doubt upon their authority, hence the need to find ways to cover up, ignore, overlook, or explain away apparent error.
Contrary to this attitude, the open-minded student of the revelation will not only accept what is stated in the above quotations but, with the passage of time, will henceforth expect to find an increasing error content in cosmological material, and also to discover similar error accumulating in what has been provided as a “universe frame in which to think.”
For those who are troubled by occurrences in which science and The Urantia Book express contrary views, but who do not have that special expertise to enable them to make a rational judgment among the alternatives, the revelators have included sections in the Papers for which it is possible for virtually every reader to make their own decision on the veracity of the information supplied. And surely when the Papers are wrong, this error is nevertheless in accord with universe rules and purposes for revelation as outlined on pp. 1109 and 1260 of the Urantia Papers.
Ultimately however, these errors must operate to prevent the revelation being presented to the world as divinely authoritative or being used as a basis for fundamentalism. And perhaps this is universe policy for all revelation everywhere?
One section of the Papers that requires only a minimal knowledge of arithmetic in order to be able to check its veracity concerns the revelators’ description of the concurrent development of our planet and its moon by an accretion process:
“2,500,000,000 years ago the planets had grown immensely in size. Urantia was a well-developed sphere about one tenth its present mass and was still growing rapidly by meteoric accretion.” (UB 57:6.10)
“2,000,000,000 years ago the earth began decidedly to gain on the moon. Always had the planet been larger than its satellite, but there was not so much difference in size until about this time, when enormous space bodies were captured by the earth. Urantia was then about one fifth its present size. . . .” (UB 57:7.2)
"1,500,000,000 years ago the earth was two thirds its present size, while the moon was nearing its present mass. (UB 57:7.4)
The story the revelators have given us is that our planet and its moon developed together from a meteoric cloud surrounding the sun by the process of co-accretion–and were approximately the same size until 2 billion years ago. At the -2.5 billion years mark we are told that the earth was one tenth its present mass. And since the revelators state the moon was about the same size as the earth at that time, it, too, must have been about one tenth the present mass of the earth.
At the -2 billion years mark, we’re told the earth and its moon were still about the same size, and by then, about one fifth the earth’s present mass.
But by 1.5 billion years ago, their story has it that the moon was near its present mass, and that the earth had captured enormous space bodies and grown much more quickly than the moon.
Figures quoted in Microsoft Encarta, Encyclopedia Britannica and elsewhere give the present mass of the earth as 5.94 x 1021 metric tons with its radius at 6378 km, while the present mass of the moon is given as about 7.5 x 1019 metric tons with a radius of 1738 km.
Remembering that the revelators story has it that 2.5 billion years ago the earth and moon were about the same size and about one tenth the earth’s present mass, that is both are about 5.94 x 1020 metric tons, we have the problem that this makes the moon about 8 times larger then than it now is!
Worse still, a half billion years later, 2 billion years ago, the moon and the earth were about one fifth the earth’s present mass, so about 1.2 x 1021 metric tons–which makes the moon 16 times larger than its present mass!!
At present the moon is about 1/80th the mass of the earth, and would have to have shed almost all its mass during the period between -2 and -1.5 billion years of its existence.
Presently the whole of the moon’s surface is pock-marked by impact craters and gigantic lava flows and, thanks to the Apollo missions, the basaltic rock sampled from these flows on the surface of the moon has been dated back to from 3.1 to 3.9 billion years ago. These are facts that are simply incompatible with the story provided in the Papers.
The factuality of our present analysis is readily confirmable by almost anyone prepared to take the trouble. No knowledge of science or any other specialized knowledge is required to see that The Urantia Book’s account of the evolution of the earth-moon system is simply impossibly wrong.
An important question we must ask is why the revelators appear to have been at such pains to ensure that, over time, it would progressively become more and more impossible for the Urantia Papers as a whole, to be imposed upon intelligent people as the authoritative word of God.
One reason may be because of the sovereignty of our free will: “Having thus provided for the growth of the immortal soul and having liberated man’s inner self from the fetters of absolute dependence on antecedent causation, the Father stands aside. . . No other being, force, creator, or agency in all the wide universe of universes can interfere to any degree with the absolute sovereignty of the mortal free will, as it operates within the realms of choice, regarding the eternal destiny of the personality of the choosing mortal. As pertains to eternal survival, God has decreed the sovereignty of the material and mortal will, and that decree is absolute.” (UB 5:6.8)
Imagine this: We live under a despotic king who has informed us that provided we accept doing his will absolutely in every detail, we will be rewarded with a knighthood and a castle–but if we reject his offer, we face certain death. Do we really have a free will choice??
Any absolutely certain knowledge we might have about even the existence of a God restricts our free will–for if there is a God, surely we have to ask ourselves what might he want from us?
At the other extreme, if our desire is for a God who is perfect goodness and perfect love and we are prepared to live our lives according to what we believe his will to be, even if he may eventually prove to be non-existent, then surely we would have made a truly meritorious free will decision–one with no thought of reward, no dangling carrot.
If you were God, what would you want of your created children? Anyone prepared to delve deeply into that question will surely come to understand why we, God’s earthly children, cannot be given a divine, authoritative revelation, and why we must labor midst uncertainty in order to ultimately attain a truly worthwhile goal of eternal life.
But does that not still leave us floundering with an unanswered question–how can we mere mortals be expected to distinguish revelation from error and the mundane? Simple–revelation always has spiritual value. And error? Never!
¶ References
- Scientific American, Volume 289, No. 6 (2003) The New Moon.
¶ External links
- Article in Innerface International: https://urantia-book.org/archive/newsletters/innerface/vol11_4/page12.html
| How far to Andromeda | Volume 11 - No. 4 — Index | The Ridiculous—Passenger Birds and Secondary Midwayers |