© 1993 Ken Glasziou
© 1993 The Christian Fellowship of Students of The Urantia Book
The Urantia Book purports to be a revelation given to mortals by celestial beings. When first introduced to the book, I assumed it had been written by a committee of well-meaning academics on a save-the-world mission. On becoming more familiar with the content of the book, I was impressed not only by the quality and consistency of its message, but also noticed material of a scientific nature that could only have been guesswork at the time the papers were received. It did not make sense that a group of obviously knowledgeable and talented authors would risk jeopardizing acceptance of their work by including contentious prophetic material, particularly since the book could easily have earned recognition as a philosophic and religious work of great merit.
There have been suggestions that various single authors wrote The Urantia Book-Dr. William Sadler, Wilfred Kellogg, Carl Jung, H. G. Wells, and Robert Millikin being among those named. There are many ways in which investigators have attempted to verify or refute the authorship of documents. For example, the Epistles attributed to Paul in the New Testament have long been a subject for investigation. One of the methods of investigating authorship is based on style analysis, as authors tend to stamp their personal idiosyncrasies on documents they write. A method that was used to examine the Pauline letters was based on the number of sentences having zero, one, two, or more occurrences of the Greek word “Kai” (Morton, 1965).
Recent advances in computer technology and the existence of excellent search programs have made possible the investigation of even lengthy works. The methods which I used to investigate The Urantia Book were largely dictated by the convenience of statistical facts which could be extracted from a database of the book.
The method chosen was to determine the number of occasions sentences commenced with a particular marker word, a method used by Mosteller and Wallace. The words chosen were: “how,” “when,” “and,” “but,” and “this.” A second study also used marker words described by Mosteller and Wallace [1] as function words, such as “also,” “an,” and “by.”
Using a Folio Views search program, in combination with a Urantia Book database, will give the frequency of occurrence and position of any individual word in the entire book, the frequency and location of combinations of words in a paragraph, or the frequency and location of phrases in paragraphs. For example, to find a phrase such as “son of God,” the search command must be enclosed in inverted commas, otherwise one obtains paragraphs in which all three words occur, but not necessarily as a phrase. This same method is also used to obtain the frequency and position of the occurrence of words that start or end a sentence. To locate sentences commencing with a particular word, one searches for a period followed by a space, then the required word. To find sentences that end with a particular word, the word followed by a period is adequate.
The Chi Square distribution was used for all statistical testing. This statistical technique gives a level of significance or probability § that a relationship does or does not occur by chance. A 0.1% probability level indicates that there is less than one chance in 1000 that the two comparisons being made are drawn from the same sample. In other words, a 0.1% level of significance indicates that there is less than one chance in a thousand that the two samples had the same author. The 5% level is usually accepted as indicating a significant difference.
Initially, an approach was made to ascertain if there was a style difference between Parts I, II, and III, taken as a whole, and Part IV. The reason for this choice is that the papers in Parts I-III claim to be written by celestial beings, whereas the authors of Part IV are said to be “midwayers” — personalities not far in advance of human beings. When this analysis indicated that the two components were indeed significantly different, the research was extended to test each of the parts separately, some individual authors, and two additional studies.
It has been proposed that Dr. Sadler was capable of writing the scientific material describing the early history of the earth (Papers 57-62), the in-depth account of religion and theology (Part I and Papers 99-107), and Part IV (The Life and Teachings of Jesus). The second study was undertaken to investigate whether these papers were indeed written by a single author. In this case, marker words suggested by Mosteller and Wallace such as “an,” “also,” “upon,” “by,” “there,” and “this,” were used to test this hypothesis following procedures suggested by Kenny. [2]
A third study was conducted using a sample of Dr. Sadler’s writing, “The Evolution of the Soul,” a 1946 public lecture of about 6,000 words. [3] After eliminating verbatim quotations from The Urantia Book, the text was examined using a style analysis computer program (Readability Plus).
When tested by use of the Chi Square distribution, the hypothesis that the Foreword, Parts I, II, III, and IV are all distinct works was highly significant for the words “when,” “where,” “and,” “but,” and “this.” No sentences in the Foreword commenced with the word “how,” but the use of sentences commencing with this word indicated that Parts I, II, and III were distinctly different from Part IV. Parts of the book attributed to Divine Counselors, Life Carriers, Melchizedeks, and a Solitary Messenger were also found to be distinguishable.
The second study showed that Papers 57-62 differ from Papers 99-107 (P=0.010); Papers 57-62 differ from Part IV (P=0.001); Papers 99-107 differ from Part I (P=0.01); and Papers 99-107 differ from Part IV (P=0.001). These results show that the postulate of a single authorship for various combinations of this material is not supported.
The study comparing Dr. Sadler’s lecture, “The Evolution of the Soul,” with Urantia Book material clearly differentiated two distinct writing styles on the basis of sentence structure (P=0.005), sentence length (P=0.05), and the Flesch Reading Index (P=0.05). Besides indicating that Dr. Sadler did not write The Urantia Book, the results of this investigation add another dimension to the task of demonstrating claims that human agencies may have compiled The Urantia Book. It now becomes necessary also to offer a rational explanation on how the involvement of so many outstanding individuals in such a major task could have been kept totally secret over a period exceeding fifty years. A further problem is how the remarkable consistency of the material found in this book could be maintained by multiple human authors (or even a single author) working well before the days when computer search programs and data bases became available.
[Addendum: An additional study has been completed in collaboration with my son, Paul, a medical graduate with a Ph. D. in mathematics and statistics, who suggested that it would be possible to apply these same techniques to compare writing styles for single authors who are named as the writers of multiple papers in the book. A search of the index of The Urantia Book indicated the likelihood that at least five of the authors named had contributed four or more papers. This enabled a study to be made that included the variability between papers by the same author as well as variability between authors. This study has clearly distinguished between all five of the selected authors.]
Ken Glasziou 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. and Christ or Chaos: The Evolution of a Revelation.
Mosteller, F. and D. L. Wallace. “Applied Bayesian and Classical Inference. The Case of the Federalist Papers.” Springer Verlag, New York, 1984 ↩︎
Kenny, Anthony. The Computation of Style. Pergamon Press Ltd., 1982 ↩︎
Sadler, William S. The Evolution of the Soul. Ayers Foundation, 1941, Good Cheer Press, 1990 ↩︎