© 1991 Kenneth T. Glasziou
© 1991 The Christian Fellowship of Students of The Urantia Book
Materialism and atheism are modern diseases — or phenomena, depending on one’s point of view — that had their roots among the empiricists of the 16th, 17th, and 18th century. Prominent in this group were Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and David Hume. Perhaps the best known statement originating from their work is that of Hume who, in his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, said: “When we run over our libraries, persuaded of these principles, what havoc we must make. If we take in our hand any volume of divinity or school metaphysics for instance, let us ask, does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity and number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matters of fact or existence? No. Commit it then to the flames for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.” Presumably art, literature, poetry, and music also would have contributed to Hume’s bonfire.
The present dying stages of the age of materialism present both a challenge and an opportunity to prepare the way for a new era of religious revival. The age of materialism should really have terminated in 1909 when Geiger and Marsden, working under Rutherford in England, bombarded a thin sheet of metallic foil with alpha particles and, to their amazement, found that most of the particles went straight through the metal foil without touching anything. A few of these particles, however, rebounded as if they had collided with something solid.
At that time, when we thought about the nature of matter, our minds would be likely to picture some solid object such as a brick whose micro structure was packed with billions of atoms with their electrons embedded like currants in a Christmas pudding. The new atomic model that emerged from Rutherford’s laboratory was composed of a tiny nucleus, only a thousand billionth of a centimeter in size, surrounded by a cloud of electrons that extended out to a distance of about one hundred millionth of a centimeter. This tiny nucleus occupies one- one hundred thousand billionth of the volume of the atom. To date it has not been possible to show that an electron has any measurable dimensions. Thus, in terms of its nucleus “matter” component, a brick is almost entirely empty space.
Few of us have the ability to grasp the full meaning of this discovery. Our bodies, the material houses we live in, are made up of atoms. It may help to picture what the result would be if all of the “matter” of our bodies were squeezed together. Something similar to this occurs during the dying phases of a large star when it collapses to become a neutron star. In such circumstances our body volume would be very much less than the head of a pin. But even the final nature of this matter component is in doubt. Each of the nucleons that make up the atomic nucleus is itself thought to be made up of three unimaginably smaller point particles called quarks, and these in turn may only be the expression of some kind of force field. Thus the “concrete” world that is signaled to our brains via the medium of our senses, and translated by our minds as “material reality,” is really only the nebulous interplay of the force fields. Realistically, the physical world is empty space and very little else. Perhaps Bultmann, the great German theologian, intuitively grasped this truth when, in his book Existence and Faith, he said, “God’s creation is out of nothing; and to be God’s creature means absolutely and in every moment to have one’s source in him, and in such a way that were he to withhold his creative will, the creature would fall back into nothingness.”
Our understanding of the nebulous nature of matter was further fortified as a result of the work of Dirac which vividly exemplified the true meaning of Einstein’s famous equation equating energy and matter. Dirac’s theories were explicable if all particles had an anti-particle, their mirror image in all respects. The coming together of two such particles was expected to result in their mutual annihilation during which they would be converted to pure energy. This expectation was soon realized experimentally. Nowadays, the production and annihilation of such particle pairs in physics laboratories is routine.
The present dying stages of the age of materialism present both a challenge and an opportunity to prepare the way for a new era of religious revival.
Modern physics has many such bizarre findings to tantalize our minds but we will deal with only one more — the pairs of virtual particles, particle and anti-particle, that flash in and out of existence as a result of borrowing energy from a vacuum. This would indeed be an “Alice in Wonderland” fantasy if it were not for the fact that the experiments of Hendrick Casimir and others have established excellent confirmatory evidence for this phenomena. Other predicted outcomes of virtual particle effects such as the Lamb effect on the hydrogen spectrum have also been confirmed. This is but a tiny sample of the extraordinary behavior of the minute particles that make up the micro world of physics. But it is not just the micro world that contradicts the materialist concept of “what I see is what there is.” Einstein’s relativity theory, as well as telling us that matter and energy are interconvertible, has also forced us to revise our ideas of time and space and to accept that time can stand still and distance can shrink to nothingness.
It is worth noticing at this point that both real and virtual particles have a common feature — both may be derived from and converted into energy. But what is this energy? We cannot see it, touch it, smell it, weigh it, or locate it in time and space. We cannot even imagine it. Pure energy is an abstraction to which we can attribute no properties other than to assure ourselves that somehow or other it exists, and that it is the source of all matter. The modern educated materialist has no option but to admit that these statements are factual and have been demonstrated by empirical means. But there is an unbridgeable gap in this knowledge — the materialist has no explanation for how the abstract becomes “real” or vice versa. How foolish humans are when they deny the reality of God and their own soul as being irrelevant and wishful abstractions, while at the same time blinding themselves to the fact that the source of supposedly material reality is also an abstraction! Neither should the materialist scientist discount religious experience on the grounds of credulity so long as they persist with the assumption that man’s selfawareness, his intellectual and philosophical endowments, and his innate sense of morality, emerged spontaneously from some lifeless primordial ooze!
Neither should the materialist scientist discount religious experience on the grounds of credulity so long as they persist with the assumption that man’s self-awareness, his intellectual and philosophical endowments, and his innate sense of morality, emerged spontaneously from some lifeless primordial ooze!
It is true that the materialistic, mechanistic concept of time, space, and matter still persists among most of our population. Even secondary schoolchildren, however, are now aware that our scientists can accelerate particles to near the speed of light and directly observe the attenuation of time and distance. Clocks are available that are sufficiently accurate to measure the differences in the lapse of time between the top and the bottom of a city building due to gravitational effects (the clock at the top of the building runs faster). We can shoot a rocket into space and demonstrate that, because of its velocity, a clock there runs more slowly than one on the ground. Materialism is indeed on borrowed time.
Still to penetrate into the knowledge sphere of general society is the significance of the work of mathematicians such as Godel, Church, Turing, Shannon, and many others upon our concepts of the limitations of human knowledge. Godel’s incompleteness theorem, paraphrased, states that all consistent axiomatic formulations of number theory include undecidable propositions. Algorithmic information theory tells us that incompleteness and randomness are natural and pervasive in mathematics. If uncertainty pervades mathematics, and mathematics is the basis of all science, how then can any scientist claim that one day we will know all of the secrets of creation?
In these days of enormously rapid advance in the technology of computer systems and the growth of the concepts of “clever” machines and artificial intelligence, many of us are inclined to believe that there is nothing unusual about the human mind, that it too can be described in terms of the laws of physics and may even be outstripped by computers. But thirty years of research in these fields have really only led to a growing awareness of the incredible complexity and abilities of the human mind. Ignoring the fact that computers are programmed by human minds ( even a self-programming computer is the work of the human mind), the work of Turing tells us that the bounds of computability must remain more limited than human thinking, if for no other reason than that many mathematical problems are not susceptible to algorithmic analysis. Roger Penrose, a British mathematician and theoretical physicist, suggests that these bounds of computability are related to Godel’s theorem, in that the undecidable propositions inherent in axiomatic systems may be self-evident truths to the human mind, but must remain forever undecidable to the computer. This suggestion has far-reaching implications for our concept of the nature of mind.
Our concept of values has taken an enormous beating from the pronouncements of the empiricists that only things that can be measured or counted have meaning and value. This philosophy led directly to the conclusion that there is no basis for morality, beauty, or goodness and to the pessimistic viewpoint that the fact of existence is a cruel absurdity. We now know that the axioms of the empiricists were quite wrong, but are we ready to fill the gap left by these discredited assumptions?
Contrary to its effects upon religion, philosophy, ethics, and morality, the philosophy of empiricism has had many beneficial and remarkable results because it gave rise to the scientific method of thinking that has brought us into the age of technology. Certainly there have been negative effects because of too rapid advance, nevertheless modern technology has brought enormous benefits in that it has liberated the majority of humankind from the fetters of a lifetime of continuous struggle to obtain the barest essentials of subsistence. But not without exacting a price.
Our concept of values has taken an enormous beating from the pronouncements of the empiricists that only things that can be measured or counted have meaning and value. … We now know that the axioms of the empiricists were quite wrong, but are we ready to fill the gap left by these discredited assumptions?
Obviously enormous stresses on human society develop during times of dynamic change which then require rapid readjustments to compensate for any adverse effects. For all complex systems where a large number of factors interact, stability is favored when automatic compensatory effects are built into the system — often known as negative feedback control. In free market economic systems, for example, stability tends to be generated by compensatory adjustments of supply, demand, and prices. All such systems are inherently oscillatory and good design is required to minimize the amplitude of oscillations. Human society is a vast and exceedingly complex system, largely self-regulatory because of negative feedback control. Such systems adjust satisfactorily when those inputs that produce oscillations change by only small amounts or else change slowly. Large and rapid changes tend to produce very large oscillations which, if uncorrected, may destroy the system. We are living in a period of history in which society is undergoing rapid change. For the foreseeable future, human society will go from crisis to crisis and will indeed be fortunate not to collapse. The Urantia Book indicates that we can expect continuing instability for the next one thousand years during which period religion will be presented with unique opportunities as a stabilizing influence. One of the major contributing factors to instability will be the rapid exhaustion of non-renewable resources. Others will be our inability to regulate population growth, and genetic deterioration due to removal of natural selection pressures. Both are problems with challenging religious overtones.
I do not believe that human intelligence, human wisdom, and human compassion are in any way adequate to compensate for the dominating self-assertive and self-preservation tendencies inherent in human nature. It appears that we are heading for disaster. Perhaps this is why the Urantia papers have appeared on earth at this time. It may be that these papers were never meant to usher in a new Christian or even Jesusonian religion. They may have been given so that farseeing and forward looking men and women will utilize the superior knowledge and wisdom contained in these papers to construct new and appealing philosophies of living, specifically adapted to the needs of all communities that have the common bond of belief in a God whose dominant relationship with all people is love. Traditional religions may not be able to fill the gap that has developed since the logic of science challenged the dogmatism of religious authoritarianism. Although we now know that there can be no empirical test that will reveal absolute truth, the doctrines of both science and religion must be able to withstand the rigors of rational examination; increasingly an educated population will not accept assertions that are an affront to personal intellectual honesty and integrity. From the viewpoint of all responsible religionists, these new philosophies of living must be evolutionary and progressive so that men and women from all nations, races, and religions, and from all levels of intellectual, social and spiritual advancement will have a common goal — the Fatherhood of God and the kinship of all people. Unity of purpose is desirable, indeed essential, but uniformity of means is neither practical or necessarily desirable.
Whether or not the Urantia papers are accepted as revelation or whether they are utilized because of the quality of their content is not as important as the pragmatic necessity that these concepts help to guide the religious and spiritual growth of humankind. Nor is it important that the Urantia papers be acknowledged as a contributing factor in any new revival as long as the teachings they contain that bear upon the universality of the Fatherhood of God and the kinship of all people are introduced into current religious thinking.
The teachings of the Urantia papers have the potential to markedly enhance the quality of thought and effectiveness of the work of those farseeing men and women who are destined to create our new philosophies of living. It may be helpful to some to know of my own experiences as a scientist in coming to accept the Urantia papers as genuine revelation. I was born in 1923, the second son of lower middle class parents who were moderately dedicated members of the low Anglican Church. There were no fundamentalist overtones, no over-emphasis of the importance of communion or any other sacrament or creed in our church. The acceptance of the concept of a Father-God and the sonship of Jesus Christ was not in doubt, and the essence of all religious instruction centered on the gospel teachings. My early years were dominated by depression and war. At the age of 16, I gave my life to Jesus, and except for a few years during and after World War II, this commitment has guided my life.
Traditional religions may not be able to fill the gap that has developed since the logic of science challenged the dogmatism of religious authoritarianism.
I was a late starter at the university — 26 years of age when I entered the Faculty of Science at the University of Sydney. My religious faith was then in tatters and one of the contributing factors to my entering higher education was that a friend, who had just completed his Bachelor of Arts degree, assured me that the faculty at the University knew that there was no God. My desire to enter the university was partly motivated by curiosity as to how such knowledge could be obtained.
I commenced at the university with a firm belief that a prominent principle of university education was an inalienable dedication to the pursuit of truth. By my second year, I had lost this illusion but had also rediscovered my earlier faith. The years rolled by, I entered upon a research career, took my family overseas to the California Institute of Technology, and later built a research institute at Brisbane, Australia, where I remained until spinal injuries received in war-time forced an early retirement. During all these years I was a regular member of the Anglican Church and a conscientious reader of the Bible. In retrospect, I realize that my Bible readings took an unusual course. While in the United States we had acquired a King James translation that had the spoken word of Jesus printed in red ink. Gradually my Bible reading became confined to those words in red, and eventually I knew most of Jesus’ spoken word by rote. Some of the words attributed to Jesus seemed out of character and were set aside. From the remainder, I developed a concept of a Father-God that was quite different from that preached by many religious sects, but nevertheless in line with much of the great Christian literature.
In about 1974, one of my sons brought home The Urantia Book and asked me to look at it and give an opinion. I read Part IV, the Life of Jesus, and in it met the Jesus whom I had come to know and love from the red ink words in my King James Bible. I read casually in other parts of The Urantia Book, but was not overly impressed except that I noticed the superlative quality of the writing and a remarkable consistency in the text of the book. Only slowly did I appreciate that this book was seriously claiming to be a revelation. My acquired skepticism, bred of a long career in research science, led me to mentally reject such a claim.
In about 1974, one of my sons brought home The Urantia Book and asked me to look at it and give an opinion. I read Part IV, the Life of Jesus, and in it met the Jesus whom I had come to know and love from the red ink words in my King James Bible.
Soon I started to notice odd statements in the science content of the book that I knew would have to have been wild guesses at the date of its publication in 1955. I thought that including such statements was a quite extraordinary thing to do, for my attitude was that if just one of them proved to be untrue, the claims of the book would be invalidated. I asked myself why such an obviously clever and well informed group of authors would write a 2000 page book with such enormous dedication and care, then risk having it falsified by just one wrong and totally unnecessary prophetic statement.
I came to assume that the authors must be attempting to upgrade our planetary religious outlook in an effort to counteract the awful threat of atomic warfare incumbent upon the world at that time. I assumed that the authors were an altruistic, God-playing committee of academics on a savethe-world mission. Since I had participated in the production of several books in various areas of biological science that were put together as individual contributions by a number of authors, I was fully aware that such books usually turn out to be inconsistent and disjointed. So there was a difficulty. The consistency of The Urantia Book seemed to be too high to have been the product of a committee of even exceptional human beings; on the other hand both the quality of its content and the extent of knowledge that it demonstrated seemed to be well beyond the capacity of any single person.
Gradually I accumulated a number of statements from The Urantia Book that I knew would have been sheer guesswork in 1955. As their number grew, I readjusted my assessment of the likelihood that the book really was what it claimed to be. By this time I had read the book from cover to cover and become familiar with the mandate given to the authors, and thus realized that much of its science content would be of the early 1930’s vintage.
One requirement of the mandate was that the authors were not permitted to provide us with unearned knowledge. In discussing matters with a science component, the authors were instructed to utilize the best available concepts of the day, which was around 1934. However there was one clause that allowed the supplying of information which could fill in vital missing gaps in otherwise earned knowledge. Presumably the prophetic statements that I had noticed were considered to be in this category. In all, I collected more than twenty items of information that would have been guesswork in the early 1950’s and which had since been accepted as correct by the science community.
I finally accepted the book without reservation in the early 1980’s. This acceptance has been strengthened by contact with like-minded readers of The Urantia Book who have noted other information in this book that could not have been obtained with certainty prior to its publication. One of these is the dates assigned to a triple conjunction of the planets, Jupiter and Saturn which The Urantia Book tells us gave rise to the story of the three wise men from the east who were guided to the birthplace of Jesus by the star of Bethlehem. These dates were not known with any high degree of accuracy prior to the writing of a computer program in 1976 in a cooperative venture by California’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the U.S. Naval Observatory. Although still not in perfect agreement, the estimates for these conjunctions calculated with the best of today’s technology are within a day of those given in The Urantia Book, which was in print before computers that could perform such a task became available. The chances of predicting these dates through guesswork are incredibly small.
The consistency of The Urantia Book seemed to be too high to have been the product of a committee of even exceptional human beings; on the other hand both the quality of its content and the extent of knowledge that it demonstrated seemed to be well beyond the capacity of any single person.
We have seen that materialist science can provide no direct proof for the existence of “pure energy” — that which is conjectured to be the ultimate source of matter and motion. Science offers the idea of pure energy as a rational explanation for empirical experience. Similarly the existence of God can never be proved by scientific experiment or by the pure reason of logical deduction. The only proof that one human being can offer to another for the existence of God is also experience — in this case their own personal experience of the presence of the spirit of God within themselves. For those who have not had this experience, to observe true goodness and spirituality in a God-knowing person may provide the window through which the faintest glimpse of the glory and wonder of God may be grasped, and thus provide the motivation for such observers to discover that same God within themselves.
For me, acceptance of the revelatory authority of The Urantia Book has many connotations. It is refreshing and confidence building when even such exalted personages as a Divine Counselor can state; “I portray the reality and truth of the Father’s nature and attributes with unchallengeable authority; I know whereof I speak”; but in other sections of the book disclaim authoritarianism by use of terms such as “probably” and “possibly” and statements such as: “I cannot presume to speak with perfection of understanding concerning the infinity of many of the divine attributes. Infinity of mind alone can fully comprehend infinity of existence and eternity of action.” Undoubtedly the spoken word of Jesus, Creator-Son of God, must be accepted in total faith by his followers, but in the main The Urantia Book regards truth as being dynamic and evolutionary, progressing ever upwards and onwards in step with our own individual spiritual and intellectual growth. It really leaves no room for crippling adherence to the out-of-date static proclamations of fundamentalists or the failed dogmatic conservatism of mainline religious institutions. We are encouraged as freewill sons and daughters in the ever-expanding family of our FatherGod, to courageously undertake the thrilling adventure of being guided by the spirit in our own individual pathway to eternity. The Urantia Book tells us that Jesus founded a religion of personal experience in doing the will of God and serving the human brotherhood. It is as simple as that, but nevertheless profound in its simplicity. The message of Jesus, as presented in the book, is not specifically Christian; it is for all people of all races, nations, and religions who worship our Father-God, no matter how rudimentary their understanding is of this God. The Urantia Book has the potential to remold world destiny.
K. T. Glasziou, M. Sc., Ph. D., is a research scientist, retired, who is active in church work in Australia. He is author of “Science and Religion: The New Age beyond 2000 A. D.”
“The modern age will refuse to accept a religion which is inconsistent with facts and out of harmony with its highest conceptions of truth, beauty, and goodness. The hour is striking for a rediscovery of the true and original foundations of present-day distorted and compromised Christianity — the real life and teachings of Jesus.” (UB 195:9.5)