© 2003 Ken Glasziou
© 2003 The Brotherhood of Man Library
“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.
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.
Be not curious in unnecessary matters: for more things are shown unto thee than men understand. Ecclestiasticus 3:23
The least ofthings with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it.
Carl Gustav Jung
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 UB 101:4.1 and UB 115:1.1 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.
(See the note at the end of this paper for a quick and easy way to confirm the -2.5 billion year mass/radius data points.)
Another example of error in the Papers that interested individuals can readily check for themselves occurs with the Papers’ statement on the distance between the earth and the galaxy, Andromeda:
This far-distant nebula is visible to the naked eye, and when you view it, pause to consider that the light you behold left those distant suns almost one million years ago. (UB 15:4.7)
This means that the distance to Andromeda is the distance traveled by light in one million years, the unit of distance being named the light-year. In 1929 Hubble published his finding that Andromeda was about one million light years away from us, a figure that had to be more than doubled when, in 1951, Walter Baade discovered a problem in the methodology used by Hubble.
Recently this fact has been used by some Urantia Book fundamentalists to pour scorn on science and scientists in order to fortify their dogma that whenever there is a discrepancy between what the Urantia Papers state and scientific opinion, it is science that is wrong.
For the case of Andromeda, they justify their claim by pointing out that constants used by astronomers in calculating the distances to far away stars by esoteric methods like the red shift are known very imprecisely.
This is certainly true for far distant stars. But Andromeda is a nearby galaxy and the estimate of its distance from us required only a high quality telescope, a few simple tools, a smattering of high school mathematics, but no imprecisely-known constants.
Hubble’s 1929 estimate had utilized a method discovered by Henrietta Leavitt in 1912 and commended by the authors of the Urantia Papers in these terms, “In one group of variable stars the period of light fluctuation is directly dependent on luminosity, and knowledge of this fact enables astronomers to utilize such suns as universe lighthouses or accurate measuring points for the further exploration of distant star clusters. By this technique it is possible to measure stellar distances most precisely up to more than one million light-years.” (UB 41:3.10)
By observing the behavior of these variable stars (called Cepheid variables) in our Milky Way galaxy, and calibrating their brightness against distance from us, Leavitt could then estimate the distance to any Cepheid variable simply by measuring its brightness. And her calibration of the brightness/distance relationship, because it was made using nearby stars, could be done by methods known to surveyors, with some even being known to the Egyptians 5000 years ago.
True andfalse are attributes of speech, not of things. And where speech is not, there is neither truth nor falsehood.
Thomas Hobbes
Teach us, good Lord, to serve thee as thou deservest, to give and not to count the cost, to toil and not to seek for rest, to labor, and not to ask for any reward save that of knowing that we do your will.
Thus the dubious constants used for say, the red shift method, had no part in the erroneous measurement of one million light years to Andromeda as announced by Hubble in 1929.
So why has the modern distance to Andromeda more than doubled? Because in 1951, Walter Baade discovered that there is more than one class of Cepheid variable star and that those used by Hubble in Andromeda had a brightness-distance relationship quite different from those used by Leavitt in the Milky Way. Thus the error has nothing to do with the value of dubious constants but was simply an observer error made during development of a new technique.
This story has long been well known amongst amateur astronomer groups and may be checked by any Urantia fundamentalist simply by asking.
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 o 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!
[Note: for those who wish to check data points in Fig. 1., a quick way of confirming their correctness is to check the mass of the planet, Mars, which is a little more than one tenth of Planet Earth and so comparable with the -2.5 billion years data point in that figure. Mars has a radius of 3,398 kilometers, which corresponds well with our calculation for the radius of the earth and moon at that date. Hence this whole problem cannot be dismissed as being brought about through confusing mass and size in the text.]
¶ External links
- Article in Innerface International: https://urantia-book.org/archive/newsletters/innerface/vol10_2/page12.html