© 1996 Dr. Ken Glasziou
© 1996 The BrotherHood of Man Library
| II. Urantia Book Statements That May Fill Missing Information Gaps | Index | IV. Science Topics of Interest in the Urantia Book |
Various skeptics have put forward the names of a number of single authors who they think may have been responsible for the Urantia Papers. Among those suggestions are Dr W. S. Sadler, Wilfred Kellogg, Carl Jung, H.G. Wells, and Robert Millikan. I first read the book in response to a request to give an opinion on the claims by its author(s) for a revelatory status. My initial attitude was highly skeptical and my first reaction was that it must have been written by a group of well-meaning academics on a save-the-world mission.
As I became more familiar with the Papers, I was impressed by the consistency of their content. I had previously participated in the writing of two text books on science subjects in which a number of authors contributed chapters relevant to their particular specialties. Thus I had become aware of the extra difficulties involved in maintaining consistency when multiple authors contribute to the same work. This would have been particularly so for a 2000-page work, such as The Urantia Book, written at a time before computers, data bases, and search-and-find computer programs became available. The problem would have been infinitely greater if such a work was a product of the imagination rather than a collation of facts.
However, at this early stage of my interest in The Urantia Book, I was not prepared to suggest that this book was anything other than the work of human beings. Part 4, “The Life of Jesus,” impressed me as being an outstanding exposition. For the remainder, I had noticed a number of statements, mainly on matters of science, that were remarkably prophetic if made in the mid-1930’s. Some of these would even have been remarkable at the time of first publication of the book in 1955. So to my inquirers, I recommended that they take what they found valuable from its content and keep an open mind about its revelatory status.
About 15 years later I came upon a book entitled The Computation of Style by Anthony Kenny that discussed various ways of checking on works in which authorship is in doubt—or example, the various epistles attributed to Paul in the New Testament. Some methods depended on the rate of occurrence of unusual words or phrases, others on statistical analysis of the length of sentences, or other characteristics that gave “style” to a particular author. The favored method, where it could be applied, was one used by Mosteller and Wallace that depended, not on unusual words and phrases, but on the way authors use common words to commence sentences or to join clauses and phrases. Such words were classed as “marker” and “function” words and included also, an, by, but, the, and, when, etc. Experience soon showed that unusual words were virtually useless for statistical purposes. It is the way authors habitually use frequently occurring words that best distinguishes one from another.
While reading about the work of Mosteller and Wallace, I realized that the tools were already available to shed light on multiple authorship for the Urantia Papers. These tools were a data base for the book (Folio views), plus the means of transferring the text of the book to a word processor equipped to give word counts for individual papers. With these tools, it is relatively easy to obtain statistics on the number of sentences that commence with marker words and to quantify these in terms of word count.
The first investigation had the limited goal of deciding whether a single or multiple authors wrote the book. The results (Table 1) were printed in the Australian newsletter Six-O-Six, Vol. 13 (2), 1992 and indicated that there may have been in excess of nine authors. Later, my son, Paul, who has a Ph.D. in maths and statistics, suggested that a more rigorous investigation could be done for those authors to whom multiple papers were attributed. Such an analysis permitted the inclusion of estimates of variance both within and between authors. Five sets of four or more papers from five authors were chosen in which there was reasonable certainty that each set was attributable to the same author. The results for this investigation were printed in Six-O-Six, Vol 14 (3), 1993, and clearly distinguished between each of the five authors. Besides the data given in Table 2, a global likelihood ratio test in a logical regression analysis showed that for the marker word “And,” the results indicated four or more authors at a probability level of 0.0003. For the marker word “The,” three or more authors were indicated at a probability level of 0.0001.
| Word | Comparison Made | Probability of Difference (%) |
|---|---|---|
| How | Part 4 and Parts 1,2,3 | 0.1 |
| When | Part 4 and Parts 1,2,3 | 0.1 |
| When | Divine Counselor and whole book | 1.0 |
| When | Life Carrier and whole book | 1.0 |
| When | Melchizedek and whole book | 0.1 |
| And | Foreword and Divine Counselor | 0.1 |
| And | Foreword and whole book | 0.1 |
| And | Foreword and Part I | 1.0 |
| And | Part 1 and whole book | 0.1 |
| And | Part 2 and whole book | 0.1 |
| And | Solitary Messenger and whole book | 0.1 |
| And | Solitary Messenger and Part 3 | 5.0 |
| And | Part 4 and whole book | 0.1 |
| And | Part 4 and Parts 1,2,3 | 0.1 |
| And | Part 4 and Parts 1,2,3 | 0.1 |
| For | Life Carrier and Part 3 | 1.0 |
| But | Part 3 and Parts 1,2,4 | 0.1 |
| But | Life Carrier and Parts 1,2,4 | 1.0 |
| But | Melchizedek and Parts 1,2,4 | 5.0 |
| But | Solitary Messenger and Parts 1,2,4 | 0.1 |
| But | Part 4 and Parts 1,2 | 0.1 |
| But | Part 4 and Part 1 | 0.1 |
| But | Part 4 and Part 2 | 0.1 |
| But | Part 4 and Part 3 | 0.1 |
| This | Foreword and whole book | 1.0 |
| This | Life Carrier and whole book | 0.1 |
| This | Foreword and Divine Counselor | 0.1 |
Table 1: A Comparison of Writing Styles in Different Sections of The Urantia Book.
Word Comparison made Probability of Difference (%)
| Author | Brilliant Evening Star | Solonia | Chief of Seraphim | Archangel of Nebadon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Solonia | And, P=.025; The, P=.001; A or An, P=.001 |
|||
| Chief of Seraphim | And, P=.05; The, P=.001; But, P=.005; A or An, P=.001 |
And, P=.001; The, P=.005; A or An, P=.025; But, P=.05 |
||
| Archangel of Nebadon | And, P=.025; The, P=.005; But, P=.001 |
And, P=.001; The, P=.001; A or An, P=.005; But, P=.05 |
And, P=.005; But, P=.025; This, P=.005 |
|
| Perfector of Wisdom | And, P=.05; The, P=.005; But, P=.001; A or An, P=.001 |
And, P=.001; A or An, P=.05; As, P=.025 |
The, P=.005; But, P=.01; Many, P=.001 |
And, P=.001; This, P=.001; It, P=.001 |
Table 2: The probabilities that pairs of authors of multiple Urantia Papers are different individuals as indicated by the frequency of distribution of sentences commencing with marker words: And; But; A or An; This; Many; It. All five authors are distinguishable from one another.
For the first investigation, in addition to attempting to demonstrate multiple authorship, an effort was made to throw light on whether Dr Sadler may have been the single author postulated by others. The only work of Dr Sadler then available to me in Australia was a short essay entitled, “Evolution of the Soul,” in which about half of the text was direct quotation from The Urantia Book. The essay was too short to use the Mosteller and Wallace methods. However, after separating The Urantia Book text from the remainder, the two sections were subjected to a computerized style analysis program that provided scores on the basis of sentence length, sentence structure, and the Flesch Reading Ease Index. Each of these characteristics differentiated two distinct writing styles at statistically significant levels, thus indicating that Dr Sadler was not the author of The Urantia Book. Quotations from that essay:
The investigation on the involvement of Dr Sadler in the authorship of The Urantia Papers has come under some criticism on the basis of the small sample size of the essay, “Evolution of the Soul.” Recently, courtesy of Dr Matt Neibaur, I have been provided with “The Mind at Mischief,” a book published by Dr Sadler in 1929 that has permitted a more extensive investigation. I scanned a little more than fifty pages of this book, almost 20,000 words, into my computer, with which to test Dr Sadler’s writing style against the data already accumulated for the Mosteller and Wallace type of investigation on authorship. The Sadler text material was converted into a FolioViews database, then tested against the data for those five Urantia Book authors accredited with multiple papers. From 37 tests, 35 distinguished between Dr Sadler and the Urantia Paper author at odds of 20 to 1 or better, 30 being at 100 to 1 or greater, and 14 being better than 1000 to 1. Only two of the tests failed to attain significance (less than 20 to 1).
The Urantia Book material quoted in Dr Sadler’s aforementioned essay had been drawn from Papers 5, 110, and 111. Again using Mosteller and Wallace methodology, in two tests, the Mind at Mischief sample was compared with these Papers and showed significant differences at the 100 to 1 and 1000 to 1 levels. In his book “Urantia: The Great Cult Mystery,” Martin Gardner offers the opinion that Dr Sadler wrote Part 4 of The Urantia Book. To check this suggestion, a further two tests were made of the “Mind at Mischief” material against Papers 195 and 196 from Part 4 of the book with the result that both tests showed significant differences at the 1000 to 1 probability level.
It is a fact that some of the same unusual words and expressions are to be found in both the writings of Dr Sadler and in the Urantia Papers. This is hardly surprising since Sadler admitted to being continuously exposed to the content of the various Urantia Papers, or their precursors, certainly since 1911 and possibly since 1906, long before the final drafts of the Papers were completed. I have been reading these papers for about twenty years, have an appalling memory for poetry, literature, quotations, etc., yet still find that some of the book’s “peculiar” words and phrases have become my own. Many other readers have had the same experience. While the possibility of a degree of editing cannot be excluded, this statistical evidence rules out extensive authorship of the Papers by Dr Sadler.
The statistical evidence accumulated to date shows that any proposal that nominates a human source for the Urantia Papers must take multiple authorship into account. Matthew Block’s investigations to uncover the human sources that the Papers themselves state have been utilized indicate that the actual authors have usually imposed their own styles in incorporating this material, and that the extent of quotation of contiguous material is such that it would have little effect on the statistical analysis reported herein.
There is no way that Gardner’s proposal that the subconscious mind of a sleeping human subject was itself the source of the textual material of the Urantia Papers can be reconciled with the statistical evidence presented. The evidence is consistent with many different authors having been heavily involved in the writing of the Urantia Papers, probably far more than the minimum of about nine suggested by this investigation. Neither is the hypothesis of very extensive editing by Dr Sadler and others consistent with these findings.
This work does not rule out the involvement of a substantial committee of well qualified and erudite people as the real authors. But if there was such a committee, it becomes necessary to account for the truly remarkable consistency of this 2000 page work, plus the fact that extensive investigations by Gardner and others have failed to uncover the slightest hint of such involvement, nor to explain how total secrecy could have been maintained. I leave the readers of the Papers to draw their own conclusions.
| II. Urantia Book Statements That May Fill Missing Information Gaps | Index | IV. Science Topics of Interest in the Urantia Book |