Kathleen wrote:
There are no contradictions here.
I’m afraid there are…and there a quite a few of them based on what I’ve read so far.
To start with this issue, if “Adam and Eve” turned up 37,948 years ago, that means the only genetic stock on the planet, courtesy of Andon and Fonta, had been inbreeding with one another for 955,471 years. That’s a straightforward impossibility. The race could not possibly have survived inbreeding over even a tiny fraction of that length of time. The book says, and you’ve quoted it: “It was not that inbreeding was always bad”. Yes it is. Ask any geneticist.
On other fronts, the contradictions with known science are stark. The most obvious one being the mistake over the distance to the Andromeda galaxy. Aside from the fact that it’s described as a nebula rather than a galaxy (and this is no mere issue of semantics; there are fundamental and huge differences between the two forms) the book says it’s a million light years away. It’s actually 2.8 million light years away. Now I’ve read someone’s defence of the Urantia book’s error here by saying that human science has itself made an error in the calculation of lightspeed and hence, Andromeda’s distance from us. The reasoning is that the Urantia book says space isn’t empty and this is used to account for the slowing down of lightspeed which would make the book correct in its assertion. It is true that the speed of light is slowed when it passes through a transparent medium such as water, glass or perspex and this slowing down manifests in the splitting of white light into the seven colours of the visible spectrum. The problem is that this slowing down is measured in miniscule fractions of one percent and cannot be used as a reasoning for the Urantia book’s mistake. For that to be true the speed of light would have to be dropped by 35.7% and although it may be true that space is not empty, it’s not a solid either and it would need to be a pretty dense one for lightspeed to be retarded by that much.
Next comes the part about the behaviour of planets that orbit close to a sun.
The book cites the idea that the axial spin of planets close to a sun will gradually reduce until one of their sides is permanently facing it. This phenomenon is known as “tidal locking” and Mercury is given as the example. When the book was written, that was indeed what scientists thought happened but in the 1960s, radio astronomers discovered Mercury’s axial spin is just like all the other planets in our solar system and it’s actually faster than all of them so its whole surface is indeed exposed to the sun. Its axial spin is not slowing at all and so it will never have just one side facing the sun.
The book’s knowledge of quantum mechanics is also materially flawed. It talks of a subatomic particle called an “ultimaton” which, we are told, makes up a one hundredth part of an electron. This particle could easily be what is known as a quark in modern physics, but the problem here is that an electron cannot be composed of quarks because they are affected by the strong nuclear force whereas an electron is not. If you were to combine three quarks (not even close to one hundred) so that they have the same negative charge as an electron, what you have is a particle called a “delta minus”. Physicists know that this is not the same thing as an electron because it is 2000 times more massive than an electron, and it rapidly decays into a pion and a neutron whereas an electron is stable.
Then there is the formation of the solar system itself which the book describes in great detail. The issue here is that this description is almost identical to another early twentieth century idea, the Chamberlin-Moulton planetesimal hypothesis. This was thrown out in the 1940s because physicists discovered the theory had some major flaws in it. The currently held view of the solar system’s beginnings is based on a theory known as the “nebular hypothesis”.
I have saved the best till last, however: the poisonous doctrine of eugenics.
The book says:
“From a world standpoint, overpopulation has never been a serious problem in the past, but if war is lessened and science increasingly controls human diseases, it may become a serious problem in the near future. At such a time the great test of the wisdom of world leadership will present itself. Will Urantia rulers have the insight and courage to foster the multiplication of the average or stabilized human being instead of the extremes of the supernormal and the enormously increasing groups of the subnormal? The normal man should be fostered; he is the backbone of civilization and the source of the mutant geniuses of the race. The subnormal man should be kept under society’s control; no more
should be produced than are required to administer the lower levels of industry, those tasks requiring intelligence above the animal level but making such low-grade demands as to prove veritable slavery and bondage for the higher types of mankind”.
In Paper 72 which refers to “Government on a Neighboring Planet”, the book states that these, apparently more advanced humans than we, have:
“Recently…gone so far as to attempt the prevention of crime by sentencing those who are believed to be potential murderers and major criminals to life service in the
detention colonies. If such convicts subsequently demonstrate that they have become more normal, they may be either paroled or pardoned. The homicide rate on this continent is only one per cent of that among the other nations”.
So that’s alright then. The ends do after all justify the means. The idea that you can start to imprison people on the basis that they “might” commit a crime is monstrous! It’s a dictator’s fantasy and I don’t believe for a split second that it could or would ever be dispassionately administered. It’s a human rights catastrophe waiting to happen. Then the notion that we have to limit the breeding of “inferiors” and foster that of “the multiplication of the average or stabilized human being” is immediately contingent on the very real problem of who decides who is inferior or subnormal. The state? The population, with all its prejudices, bigotries and hatreds? This is the game the Third Reich played and we went to war with that vile regime to bring it down at gigantic human cost. Is the Urantia book saying they were actually correct in their beliefs? When Hitler talked of mentally disabled and therefore economically inactive people as “useless eaters”, was he right? Of course he wasn’t! Here the book is guilty of a spectacular devaluing of human life if it doesn’t match up to some abstract ideal. I have been reading spiritual philsophy for nearly fifty years and if there is one thing that has been communicated pretty forcibly and consistently it is this:
“Never presume to know or judge the motives of a soul. Any perceived disadvantages it has, either physical or mental, have been chosen as a method of learning by that soul, for its own reasons and you cannot know what those reasons are”.
How then is anyone, no matter how spiritually evolved or socially responsible they feel themselves to be, qualified to condemn anyone on the basis that they appear “subnormal”. And what is “subnormal anyway? Would you include Steven Hawking in that assessment? He was massively physically disabled certainly, but at the same time one of the best minds in physics for the last hundred years. I have a nephew who is severely autistic and can barely communicate but he’s a mathematical genius. Subnormal? Only if you use the narrowest and most ignorant of definitions. The idea therefore that some individuals have no value because they do not tick the boxes on someone’s “What It Means To Be An Advantageous Member Of The Species” form is heinous and disgusting and it is the one thing, if nothing else I have noted here, that in my view renders the Urantia Book the product of the those human beings, not celestials, who wrote it using the values and knowledge of their time, in the early twentieth century.
To believe in it literally and as a work of divine provenance therefore, regardless of its many scientific flaws and appalling social assessments, is just another example of blind fundamentalism.
