© 2004 Ken Glasziou
© 2004 The Brotherhood of Man Library
What if the Urantia Papers had actually been written by a human committee bent upon saving the world? Such a committee would need to have included expert-level knowledge of the Bible, the archaeology and history of the first century Palestine area, a substantial knowledge of the Roman world, plus expertise in chemistry, geology, history, physics, and general science.
The writing of the 2000-page Urantia Book would have required an enormous amount of time and effort. Hence it would be logical for the authors to have been highly selective in making guesses about future discoveries that could come within the scope of the “missing gap” information“ allowed by the mandate. Material that requires a degree of expertise to appreciate has already been covered. Further discussion of some of this supposed ”missing gap," unearned, but prophetic information follows.
Mountain Building. The Urantia Papers associate the processes of mountain building and drifting continents as being responsible for the chain of mountains on the west coast of the Americas reaching from Alaska to the bottom of South America. (UB 60:3.2)
Modern readers probably do not give the statement a passing thought. But until the mid-1950’s and even later, continental drift was classified as a no-go heresy amongst the great majority of geologists. So why was it included it as a major factor for mountain building?
Marsupial migration. The Papers say that the ancestors of kangaroos roamed Australia 45 million years ago, and that 35 million years ago there was a land bridge re-connecting Australia, Antartica, South Africa, and South America.
Marsupial fossils are found in Upper Oligocene strata (35-40 million years ago) in Australia and as far back as the Cretaceous in South America (about 65 million years ago). Marsupial fossils have also been found on Seymour Island in the Antarctic. Fossil evidence indicates that marsupials did not reach Australia from either Asia or Africa. And it is highly unlikely they evolved in isolation.
Again, most modern readers would pass over this information without realizing that, when written, the concept of continental drift up until the 1960’s, was still a major heresy. Now the linking of these three continents constitutes an accepted part of the theory.
Double star Supernova Explosion. The most recent of the major cosmic eruptions in Orvonton was the extraordinary double star explosion, the light of which reached Urantia in A.D. 1572. This conflagration was so intense that the explosion was clearly visible in broad daylight. (UB 41:3.5)
The explosion of a supernova in 1572 was a brilliant spectacle visible in broad daylight, and became known as Tycho Brahe’s nova. The Urantia Papers say that this nova was due to the explosion of a double star. The first serious theoretical description of novas and supernovas was presented in 1957 by Burbidge, Fowler, and Hoyle and indicated both single and double star nova and supernova can occur. The remnant of the Tycho Brahe supernova was re-discovered in 1952 by use of the newly invented radio telescope but could not be shown to be a single or double star explosion until it was extensively mapped by the orbiting Einstein X-ray observatory in 1967 when its double star status was demonstrated.
X-Rays from the Sun. “The interior of your sun is a vast X-ray generator”. (UB 41:5.3)
The Sun was the first celestial object determined to give off X-Rays; rocket-borne radiation counters measured X-ray emissions from its corona in 1949. In the “Physics-Astronomy Front” by Hoyle and Narliker we find, "One of the authors remembers how, in the middle 1940’s, the question of whether the sun might emit X-rays was considered by astronomers to be highly speculative.
Crab nebula. “. . . the Crab nebula, which had its origin about nine hundred years ago, and which still exhibits the mother sphere as a lone star near the center of this irregular nebular mass.” (UB 41:8.4)
The Urantia Paper states that the Crab nebular had its origin in a nova explosion occurring 900 years ago. The existence of a neutron star at its center was demonstrated in 1967 with the detection of a pulsar which pulsed at a rate of 30 per sec. This was far too high for it to originate from a white dwarf which would disintegrate if spinning at that speed. It could only be from a neutron star.
Except that they had access to privileged information, the authors of the Urantia Papers went out on a long light limb when they opted to embrace such phenomena as continental drift, the break-up of a super continent 750 million years ago, the consequential mountain building along the west coast of the Americas plus a land bridge enabling migration of marsupials between Australia, Antarctica, and South America. Then there is the neutron star story with its tiny particles devoid of electric potential, the figures they put to the radii of electron and proton, the suggestion of the still to be discovered strong force stabilizing protons and neutrons in the atomic nucleus, and so on.
However, a word of caution. The chances of correctly guessing for this small selection of prophetic material are so slight that only a totally shut mind would reject their significance. But the reason for including prophetic material is not so obvious.
In terms of what was known in the 1930’s period, even a flawed cosmology content of the Papers would have been quite adequate to provide a conceptual “universe frame in which to think” (P. 1260) that would have been suitable for the next thirty or so years. Today it is outdated and will become increasingly so.
The good side of this is that it will ensure that a label of infallibility and divine authority cannot be sustained–for even those with a reasonable level of high school education will recognize the now badly outdated state of its cosmology.
The bad side is that many may turn away from the book without having given it due consideration–and thus miss out on its genuinely unique religious and spiritual value. Apparently the powers that be have adjudged that losing readership is preferable to the Book becoming the foundation stone for yet another fundamentalist religion.
[For comment on the error component of the Urantia Papers see the July/August 2004 issue of Innerface International.]