© 2007 Philip Calabrese, Ph.D.
© 2007 The Urantia Book Fellowship
| IC 08 —The Thrill of Loving Service | Volume 8, Number 1, 2007 (Summer) — Index | Participatory Evolution |
One of the scientific ways to validate a purported divine revelation, though not the only way, or necessarily the best way, is to statistically test its associated cosmology. This may be the only way to convince a scientist that The Urantia Book is worth reading for the helpful albeit transitional science that it contains. In the case of The Urantia Book, the associated cosmology is supposed to be “of immense value” to us during this transient stage of Earth’s scientific development compared to the ages to come.
Among the scientific positions taken and systematic statements made by The Urantia Book let us focus on the population of such statements that a) were minority positions before (and possibly for a while after) the 1955 publication date, and b) are now positions that have subsequently been definitely settled and established by contemporary science.
Were The Urantia Book just in agreement with contemporary science as often as it remains at odds with contemporary science, then little statistical argument could be made for its scientific validation. But in fact, for many scientific issues contemporary science has quite often traveled a meandering path eventually converging to positions long ago taken by The Urantia Book.
Each such example makes it still less plausible that The Urantia Book was humanly written. If The Urantia Book was not humanly written then it was superhumanly written.
Here are some examples from 2006:
One third of a milligram of dust was recovered this January from the Wild 2 comet after a rendezvous with NASA’s Stardust spacecraft, which collected the comet material in a collector and then landed back on Earth.
According to Discover Magazine’s Jeffrey Winters,[1] “Researchers had anticipated that Wild 2 would contain material formed in the icy reaches between the stars long before the solar system was born, but what they found could have formed only in the hottest part of the solar nebula. Perhaps gas, dust, and small rocks from the inner part of the infant solar system were violently ejected out beyond Neptune, where comets such as Wild 2 are thought to have formed.”
The reason our scientists had anticipated that the Wild 2 material would be cold is because that is part of the condensation model of the birth of a solar system, that there will be left over material that hasn’t yet been captured by the hot interior of the postulated solar nebula or by its larger satellites. However, The Urantia Book says that our solar system did not form as a condensation of old icy material that lit up when compressed beyond a certain point, but rather by just such a violent expulsion of material from the sun’s core. [UB 57:5.6] Had our scientists found older, icy star matter in the comet, that would have undermined the case for the solar system and comets being mainly expelled material from the hot solar interior. But instead of being discredited, The Urantia Book has once again been corroborated by contemporary science even though most scientists are still clinging to a condensation model of the solar system’s origin but needing “violent solar ejections” to account for the data. While The Urantia Book says that such an origin is a very common method of solar system formation, there are nine other ways solar systems are formed. [UB 15:5.2]
The Urantia Book speaks of certain “dark gravity bodies” that completely shroud the Central Universe of Havona:
On the outskirts of this vast central universe, far out beyond the seventh belt of Havona worlds, there swirl an unbelievable number of enormous dark gravity bodies. These multitudinous dark masses are quite unlike other space bodies in many particulars; even in form they are very different. These dark gravity bodies neither reflect nor absorb light; they are nonreactive to physical-energy light, and they so completely encircle and enshroud Havona as to hide it from the view of even near-by inhabited universes of time and space. [UB 14:1.14]
This paragraph has always been difficult to interpret. After all, what is left if a body neither reflects nor absorbs light? To shroud, it must bend light around itself as though not there!
This seemingly fanciful idea was made a reality this year when a team of scientists from Duke University and Imperial College London headed by David Smith “designed radical new materials that can bend microwaves around an object so that they are neither absorbed nor scattered.”[2] The scientists succeeded in shrouding a metal cylinder two inches in diameter from microwaves, which are just like light waves but have longer wavelengths.
That such materials exist is corroboration of another implausible notion from The Urantia Book that now is reality. These dark gravity bodies also provide gravity stability to the cosmos.
According to our scientists, “dark matter” is what keeps the universes from flying apart given its rapid spinning. Scientists have realized that matter such as galaxies must have ten to twenty times the mass of their visible luminous bodies to prevent the galaxy from flying apart due to centrifugal force. As expressed by Alex Stone: “Because dark matter doesn’t interact with regular matter, or with itself, it passes right through everything.”[3]
The Urantia Book speaks of more than one type of dark matter including dark islands of space and the unrecognized gravity presence of Paradise which the Uversa astronomers calculate is exerting twenty times the gravity attraction necessary to maintain the whole grand universe, the rest going into holding the outer universes in orbit. Dark matter is a new and active area of research, but the existence and functions of several types of dark matter were already expressed in The Urantia Book in 1955.
Dark energy is what our scientists postulate is causing the observed acceleration of universe expansion. Rather than the supposed universe expansion slowing down, it is speeding up the further out our scientists observe. That the universe might undergo cycles of expansion and contraction with an implied periodic acceleration presently occurring has not been seriously considered. The observed acceleration has not yet been taken as evidence of such a possibility of periodic motion. But The Urantia Book claims that there are such two billion year cycles of acceleration and slowing and reversal of direction of space itself:
The cycles of space respiration extend in each phase for a little more than one billion Urantia years. During one phase the universes expand; during the next they contract. Pervaded space is now approaching the mid-point of the expanding phase, while unpervaded space nears the mid-point of the contracting phase, and we are informed that the outermost limits of both space extensions are, theoretically, now approximately equidistant from Paradise. [UB 11:6.4]
Since the expansion is nearing the midpoint of the expanding phase it has therefore recently been accelerating and will presently starting slowing after it reaches that midpoint. So in this paragraph The Urantia Book may be providing an explanation for the observed acceleration of space expansion.
As our scientists map the speed of apparent space expansion at larger distances they should find a huge zone of deceleration since light from the most distant objects was emitted more than 500 hundred million years ago, at a time, according to The Urantia Book, when pervaded space was contracting. The further out from there the faster the deceleration should be for another 500 hundred million light years.
Russian and American scientists were able to smash an atom of californium (with 98 protons) with an atom of calcium (having 20 protons) to very briefly form a new atom for less than a thousandth of a second. And it took 3 times 10 to the 19th collisions to get just 3 atoms to stick together. The team expects to find even heavier elements that will last a few hours.[4] The Urantia Book predicted that an atom would be very short lived when more than 100 electrons are in orbit around it as would be the case for an atom with 118 protons.
In Orvonton it has never been possible naturally to assemble over one hundred orbital electrons in one atomic system. When one hundred and one have been artificially introduced into the orbital field, the result has always been the well-nigh instantaneous disruption of the central proton with the wild dispersion of the electrons and other liberated energies. [UB 42:7.7]
As another example of The Urantia Book’s uncanny ability to avoid error and provide truth, geologists at Stanford University were able to determine a minimum age for the Sierra Nevada mountain range by examining rain that fell there 45 million years ago that was captured in soaked gravel. They found that it fell at similar altitudes as rain falling there now. (Rain falling at lower altitudes contains a higher percentage of deuterium [heavy hydrogen] than rain falling at high altitudes.) According to Discover Magazine’s Kathy A. Svitil, this “settled a long-running dispute over the age of the Sierra Nevada range” in which “most scientists had put the Sierra’s age at under 5 million years old.”[5]
By contrast, the 1955 Urantia Book [UB 60:3-4] [UB 59:5.20] fully explains, and in great detail, the whole mountain formation process (still largely unrecognized) including how the Sierras were initially formed at the end of the Cretaceous period (144 to 65 million years ago),[6] during the western continental crunch up against an obstruction on the floor of the Pacific ocean which ended the westward drift of the North and South American continents. The Sierras were subsequently worn down and submerged but then re-elevated by on-going volcanic action. The story is complicated.
25,000,000 years ago there was a slight land submergence following the long epoch of land elevation. . . . The Sierras were well re-elevated; in fact, they have been rising ever since. . . . [UB 61:3.3]
Had the authors of the 1955 Urantia Book known no more than most geologists living in 2006, they would likely have given an erroneous account of how the Sierra Nevadas were formed less than 5 million years ago.
Finally a warning! Several events have made it clear that for whatever reason we are experiencing global warming. The arctic ice is melting faster than before, endangering polar bears; the permafrost is releasing trapped carbon dioxide as it melts, which accelerates the warming of the atmosphere. Weather seems more extreme. We hear about it daily now. Well, if we need another wake-up, consider this ominous comment by The Urantia Book:
100,000 years ago, during the retreat of the last glacier, the vast polar ice sheets began to form, and the center of ice accumulation moved considerably northward. And as long as the polar regions continue to be covered with ice, it is hardly possible for another glacial age to occur, regardless of future land elevations or modification of ocean currents. [UB 61:7.11]
The obvious question is what happens if those vast polar ice sheets melt?
Phil Calabrese is an award-winning mathematician, and spent forty years in teaching, both college level statistics and the first college course for credit on The Urantia Book in 1971, in addition to presenting the cosmological implications of the book at various conferences over the years. In 1990, as a result of a paper he had published, he was awarded a senior research associateship by the National Research Council and subsequently won a 3-year prime contract with the US Navy to provide “techniques for uncertain conditional information processing.”
| IC 08 —The Thrill of Loving Service | Volume 8, Number 1, 2007 (Summer) — Index | Participatory Evolution |
“Comet Dust Records Solar System Chaos,” Jeffrey Winters, Discover Magazine, Jan. 2007, p.52 ↩︎
“Invisibility Cloak Invented!” Josie Glausiusz, Discover Magazine, Jan. 2007, p.44 ↩︎
“Cosmic Collision Brings Dark Matter into View,” Alex Stone, Discover Magazine, Jan. 2007, p.25. ↩︎
“Element 118 Debuts on the Periodic Table,” Alex Stone. Discover Magazine, Jan. 2007, p.64 ↩︎
“Ancient Rain Settles Sierra’s Age,” Kathy A. Svitil, Discover Magazine, Jan. 2007, p.53 ↩︎
http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/mesozoic/cretaceous/cretaceous.html ↩︎