© 1996 Ken Glasziou
© 1996 The Brotherhood of Man Library
Based on a talk given at IC96 by Ken Glasziou, Maleny, Australia
About 10 years ago I was asked some questions about the science content of The Urantia Book and made the off-the-cuff reply that if some of its materials were written prior to 1955 (the original date of publication) then it was of genius quality. I then ventured that it was hard to see how some of it could have been written in the absence of prior knowledge on the part of the authors. I was asked to write on this for the Australian Newsletter, Six-0-Six, and for reasons unknown to me, this science content subject material has occupied a considerable portion of my subsequent life.
About 2 years later I found myself, together with my wife, in the home of Jim and Eunice Mills at Pensacola, Florida. The purpose of the visit was to discover as much as possible about cut-off dates for the writing of various materials in the book, i.e. was it all written by 1934/5, or could additions have been made up to and even after 1955. Jim Mills was an interesting character. Then more than 80 years of age, he was teaching philosophy classes at the Pensacola campus of the University of Florida. Originally Jim was some kind of industrial chemist, but during the years of his reading of The Urantia Book, he became imbued with the idea it should become an acceptable object for study in the appropriate departments of U.S. universities—philosophy, theology, religion, humanities, etc.
I could see Jim’s point. If studied, for whatever reason, in any of the prestigious universities, sooner or later its study would filter through to the seminaries that train the ministers and priests of our various Christian sects, and maybe, at some future date, it would be respectable for such ministers of religion to present from the pulpit, teachings taken from The Urantia Book.
I suppose that, because of the ‘accidents’ that appear to shape our earthly lives, my knowledge of basic science was weighted differently from Jim’s and I could already see that there was much material of a scientific nature in this strange book that would weigh heavily against it finding the kind of status in the academic world for which Jim was hoping.
In my view, it is undoubtedly true that, if written during 1934/5 and even up to 1955 and beyond, The Urantia Book does contain some remarkable scientific, archaeological, and anthropological material that is indicative of extraordinary knowledge on the part of its authors. For some of these individual items, I’m quite sure that a person with intense knowledge of the appropriate field, would be forced to accept that the odds against it being composed correctly by a human author would have to have been of astronomical proportions.
A persistent rumor indicates that a quite considerable number of new readers have perceived the “prophetic” science material as an adequate reason for them to undertake a serious study of the book, at least during the very initial stages of their contact. Later, its importance to them may decline to zero.
If most or all of the science material in the book had been of the quality of its prophetic science, it seems likely that the book would have been quickly accepted in academia and from there penetrated widely into the Christian churches. But this is not the case.
Besides its prophetic material, this strange book contains portions having the potential of being utilized for its ridicule. Thinking this over, I came to a rough figure of about 3% of its content that, if removed prior to the first printing, perhaps would have turned the book into the sensation that many of the original forum hoped for or expected. Given the removal of that material and some attention-drawing mechanism to its prophetic components (italics for example), then it seems likely that this revelation could have catalyzed a revolution, maybe even achieving already, the hope expressed in:
“What a transcendent service if, through this revelation, the Son of Man should be recovered from the tomb of traditional theology and be presented as the living Jesus to the church that bears his name…” (UB 196:1.2)
Assuming that those difficult bits and pieces had been edited out of the book and some emphasis given to the prophetic materials, let me quote from the book on what might have come to pass had its science been leading the way.
“The philosophic elimination of religious fear and the steady progress of science add greatly to the mortality of false gods.” (UB 102:6.1)
“Ancient magic was the cocoon of modern science, indispensable in its time but now no longer useful. And so the phantasms of ignorant superstition agitated primitive minds of men until the concepts of science could be born. Today, Urantia is in the twilight zone of this intellectual evolution. One half of the world is grasping eagerly for the light of truth and the facts of scientific discovery, while the other half languishes in the arms of ancient superstition and but thinly disguised magic.” (UB 88:6.8)
“Science teaches man to speak the new language of mathematics and trains his thoughts along lines of exacting precision. And science also stabilizes philosophy through the elimination of error, while it purifies religion by the destruction of superstition.” (UB 81:6.10)
So you see that if we scientists had been in the driver’s seat, the false gods would all be dead, philosophic elimination of religious fear would have been achieved, and religion would have been purified by the destruction of superstition. Then, by thinking with exacting and virtually errorless mathematical precision, we could have led the world such that it was already on the brink of light and life. However, reality is different. The revelators themselves scuttled us and the opportunity is gone, perhaps forever.
How did the revelators scuttle us? Some readers may not have noticed the sections in the book (I call it the ‘funny’ stuff) that have the potential to cause embarrassment, even chaos, if we were called upon to defend them at some kind of promotional gathering or perhaps a TV host show. (Have you ever noticed that people have an intense fear of being ridiculed?) I’ll only touch upon one of these sections but will also suggest that the revelators seem to have left us with an escape mechanism for this particular one, and that there may be similar escape mechanisms for some or even all other sections of ‘funny’ stuff—provided we examine them with the quality of scholarship that I have heard in Matthew Block’s IC96 talk on the human sources and David Kantor’s presentation on “Race, Evolutionary Biology, and the Kingdom of Heaven.”
Most readers will be familiar with the story of Adamson and Ratta, that they had a family of 67 children, 16 of whom are described as being “often invisible.” Remembering that both parents were superhuman, Adamson being a child of Adam and Eve, and Ratta a pureline descendant of the staff of the Planetary Prince, perhaps it was not an insurmountable shock to the scientifically-minded to cope with the book’s declaration that these 16 children were “often invisible.”
What follows is a little more difficult to digest. When Adamson noted that the two first born invisible ones were male and female, he decided to embark upon a breeding experiment and, as this first effort was successful, he continued with the experiment, the final result being that the 8 pairs of “often” invisibles brought forth 1984 “always” invisible offspring. This group we know as the secondary midwayers.
The Caligastia rebellion plus the Adamic default had a drastic influence upon the secondary midwayers, more than half of them casting in their lot with Calgastia and some even taking to penetrating and possessing the minds of subnormal humans as a means of keeping themselves amused. This phenomenon was known to the ancients as possession by demons or evil spirits.
From questions asked of a sample of book readers, it appears that, like myself, most have read this story in a more or less cursory manner and come away with the impression that the births and maturation of both the 16 parents and the 1984 secondary midwayers were a fairly normal operation except for the “invisible” factor and the secondary midwayers being nourished by some kind of electrical energy unknown to we humans.
A more scholarly reading quickly shows that while the parents of the midwayers lived and died like mortals of the realm (UB 77:6.1), the “birth” of their offspring was quite extraordinary. One piece of information is on page 862, “each couple was capable of producing a secondary midwayer every seventy days by a combined technique of sex and non-sex liaison.” But we have to skip to page 866 for the next important piece about their origin. Referring to both primary and secondary midwayers, the book says, “While the midwayers were brought into existence fully developed—experiencing no period of growth or development from immaturity—they never cease to grow in wisdom and experience.”
There is no way the conception and maturation of the secondary midwayers was in any way parallel to that for a normal human child. In fact, there is no evidence that they underwent any process resembling being “born,” and neither did they grow. If I sought a parallel from the book, I think I would pick upon the method by which two ascending humans of finaliter status bring into being a “trinitized son,” a totally new being, via some extraordinary union of their two minds and personalities that personalizes a new and unique “idea.”
It is curious that the fact that the secondary midwayers came into being fully grown and fully mature gets no mention in Section 6 of Paper 77 which is specifically about them and their creation. The way this, and other stories, are told in the book is now leading some readers to question whether the revelators have used some technique akin to allegory in order to present us with a deeper overview of the cosmology of the universes than could otherwise be given if they are to stay within the rules governing revelation. If so, this may mean that much, perhaps all, of the ‘funny’ stuff is told using a symbolism, allegory, or mythology that hides much deeper realities.
The extensive and scholarly work of Matthew Block has drawn attention to the long overlooked fact that the revelators have drawn extensively upon human sources—just as is stated on UB 0:12.12 and UB 121:8.12. As readers accept this fact, perhaps they will be more inclined to regard the Fifth Epochal Revelation, not as divine dictation, but as the word of God in the words of freewill celestial beings, some only a little higher than ourselves on the scale of intellectual ability and others many orders of magnitude above our level of knowledge, comprehension, and intellectual ability. These authors have combined together in providing us with what they believe is a reasonably comprehensible overview of the hierarchical structure for universe personalities, a new cosmology that is light years ahead of anything we have had previously, and authoritative insights into the natures of the Universal Father, the Eternal Son, the Infinite Spirit, the role of the Trinity, together with an expanded version of Jesus’ living revelation of God-likeness—and much, much more. In doing so, they have chosen whatever means they, as individuals, considered were suitable to achieve the goals that were set for them.
It is also possible that a restraint was set on this revelation—that it had to be presented in a way that would not unduly upset the normal progress of the planet. It should be obvious from reading the revelation that the goal of mortal life on inhabited planets is not a competition to attain the life and light status in record time nor that our subsequent journey to Paradise is a race to see who can get there first. It is the experiences accumulated and the overcoming of adversity on the journey that appear to be of enormous value for the fulfillment of whatever is eventually in store for us.
The inclusion of “funny stuff” was surely the deliberate act of the revelators and may have slowed up the acceptance of the revelation. If so we have to bow to their superior wisdom, accept what is, and get on with the job in hand. A part of that job may be to explain the nature of the book to the world at large. Many have attempted to foist it on others as an errorless (except for typos) divine revelation, in concept not very different from the divine dictatorship for the Bible now acknowledged by scholars (and many others) as not only out of date but quite wrong. The best description now given is that the Bible contains the word of God in the words of men (Good News Bible, Catholic Study Edition, Thomas Nelson, N.Y. 1979) and it is true that many who hold to this view have discovered for themselves the same Universal Father and the same Jesus as we encounter in The Urantia Book.
A new era for The Urantia Book appears to be dawning, one in which scholarly research, followed by explanation, exposition, midrash, exegesis, etc., that will bring greater understanding of this great book. But first we must get past the divine dictation deadlock.
To achieve better understanding, for some parts of the book it may only be necessary to update terminology in discussing its content. The book uses the phrase “mind circuits” to describe various aspects of mind, its roles, and its interactions. Perhaps the phrase “mind field” would now be more meaningful for all those who have become familiar with the “field” concept from high school and tertiary science education.
The idea of a “field” has been around among physicists for a long time, but in recent times it has blossomed to include the many quantum fields. Discussing these, Freeman Dyson, professor of physics at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton states:
“We have put into the theory of the quantum field two big ideas, the idea of quantum mechanics and the idea of relativity. These two ideas force us to construct a mathematical model which, when we deduce its consequences, we find a miracle has emerged. Automatically there emerges a third big idea, that the world is built from elementary particles. This idea is a consequence of the fact that, in a quantum field, energy can exist only in discrete units which we call quanta. When we work out the theory of these quanta, we find that they have the properties of the elementary particles that we observe in the world around us.”
So from the electric field we get the electron emerging as its accompanying particle, from the electromagnetic field we get photons as vector boson particles that bring us the photo-electric effect (which we use to trap solar energy), light, our TV signals, etc. From the neutrino field there arises the neutrinos, the gluon field, the gluons, etc., etc.; and there are yet other fields for which the particle has yet to be demonstrated—from the gravitational field we expect to find the gravitons, from the Higgs field we hope to locate the Higgs particle, and who knows what for the future?
Although we sometimes try to make models using familiar things to allow us to visualize aspects of these fields (i.e. we use the flow of water from high to low pressure to visualize electric current flowing in the direction of a voltage difference) nevertheless it is a fact that a quantum field cannot be broken down into other constituents, it just is what it is.
Now if we stretch concepts a little, is it possible to think that a midwayer just naturally arises from something we’ll call a midwayer field? And do absoniters arise from an absoniter field? And could it be that when two finaliters bring into a being a trinitized son, they are somehow using a trinitized son field in order to do so. Does that sound crazy? I can assure you that it is no more crazy than some of the concepts of quantum theory—or relativity theory for that matter. We just need to become familiar with the concepts for the strangeness to go away.
Although the use of “field” in these ways is descriptive and not empirical nevertheless it may be a good way for we Urantians to think about the mind in all its immense variations.
For example there may be a mind field accessible to the Physical Controllers that enables them to confer mechanical or non-teachable mind upon primitive organisms. Though the revelators use the words “mind circuits,” perhaps they would have used “field” if the field concept had been in more common usage in the mid-30’s.
The field concept gives us something we can visualize—for example, if we place an iron tack on a table then bring a magnet with range, although there is no visible contact between the two, we can make the tack move around. And if the magnet is strong enough we can actually feel its “pull” if we hold the tack in our fingers.
With such an example of the reality of a field in mind, it is not too difficult to visualize the Adjutant Mind Spirits being the source of a mind field that activates the electronic circuitry present in our brains and nervous system in order to allow us to react to stimuli in the way that we do. Then, beyond our world, there may be a morontia mind field, and who-knows-what beyond that. Have you ever felt the presence of a mind with which you are at one? Or the presence of a hostile or evil mind? If so, you may have experienced the interaction of mind fields. The extension of the “field” idea would provide us with both a vocabulary and concepts that are already familiar to us. The point about such ideas is that we use them if they help, and discard them if they do not.
Such models are not necessarily the truth, just a means of reaching towards truth. Galileo, Newton, Maxwell, and Einstein all used thought-models to help their thinking. For a scientist, the end test is (or at least used to be) experiment, but we Urantians may have to delay experimentation on concepts such as mind fields until we reach Mansonia or perhaps beyond—meanwhile taking comfort in the knowledge that the master philosophers of Paradise love to speculate.
Briefly reiterating what we have been through, we’ve seen that some readers such as myself firmly believe that The Urantia Book does contain material of a scientific nature that could only have been guessed at by a hypothetical human author both at the time of receipt of the Papers and also at the time of publication. But there is also the “funny stuff” that, if read as being factual, appears to be at least strange, and sometimes unbelievable. For the example of the secondary midwayers, a more intense reading shows that the detail of their origin can easily be misread, and that the whole truth is not provided. Perhaps then, in giving us the “funny stuff,” the revelators may be using techniques to convey information akin to those used by Jesus such as his parables, or his method of using gross exaggeration to get an idea across (i.e. a father giving his son a serpent or a camel getting through the eye of a needle). A technique the revelators have used extensively, and that many readers have been loath to believe even though clearly stated in the description of their mandate, is the inclusion of scientific material “soon to be outdated.” On occasion, this has been done in order to provide a cosmological overview, in principle, close to the truth but in detail, now factually incorrect.
I believe that many Urantia Book readers, myself included, have made an error more or less identical to that made by Christian fundamentalists in that our initial expectation was that the Fifth Epochal Revelation was not the word of God in the words of men, nor even the word of God in the words of celestial beings, some high, some low, but the word of God in the words of God himself. Hence we skipped over all the denials in the book itself in the hope that here at last we were in possession of absolute truth—and no longer would we have to live in uncertainty about anything. A careful study of The Urantia Book will reveal that such is not the way of the Universal Father.
We now have to re-read The Urantia Book in a more scholarly manner, recognizing its revelatory status but also recognizing that the revelators may have retained the techniques of the ages in bringing this revelation to mankind—the use of some myth, story telling, parable, anecdote, and allegory to convey that truth. At the very least, it is imperative that we explore the possibility that the first reactions many of us experienced on receiving this revelation—that it is God-given, therefore literal, absolute truth—may not be the whole story. When providing details of the rules for revelation, the revelators did not relieve us from the task of thinking for ourselves. In The Urantia Book, we have a detailed cosmological overview of final reality from which we have to struggle, as always, to discover our own personal truth. A God who loves us could do no other.
In conclusion let’s see what the book says:
. . . “The proof that revelation is revelation is this same fact of human experience: the fact that revelation does synthesize the apparently divergent sciences of nature and the theology of religion into a consistent and logical universe philosophy, a coordinated and unbroken explanation of both science and religion, thus creating a harmony of mind and satisfaction of spirit which answers in human experience those questionings of the mortal mind which craves to know how the Infinite works out his will and plans in matter, with minds, and on spirit.” (UB 101:2.1)