|
Another example of error in the Papers that interested individuals can readily check for themselves occurs with the Papers' statement on the distance between the earth and the galaxy, Andromeda:
"This far-distant nebula is visible to the naked eye, and when you view it, pause to consider that the light you behold left those distant suns almost one million years ago." (170)
This means that the distance to Andromeda is the distance traveled by light in one million years, the unit of distance being named the light-year. In 1929 Hubble published his finding that Andromeda was about one million light years away from us, a figure that had to be more than doubled when, in 1951, Walter Baade discovered a problem in the methodology used by Hubble.
Recently this fact has been used by some Urantia Book fundamentalists to pour scorn on science and scientists in order to fortify their dogma that whenever there is a discrepancy between what the Urantia Papers state and scientific opinion, it is science that is wrong.
For the case of Andromeda, they justify their claim by pointing out that constants used by astronomers in calculating the distances to far away stars by esoteric methods like the red shift are known very imprecisely.
This is certainly true for far distant stars. But Andromeda is a nearby galaxy and the estimate of its distance from us required only a high quality telescope, a few simple tools, a smattering of high school mathematics, but no imprecisely-known constants.
Hubble's 1929 estimate had utilized a method discovered by Henrietta Leavitt in 1912 and commended by the authors of the Urantia Papers in these terms, "In one group of variable stars the period of light fluctuation is directly dependent on luminosity, and knowledge of this fact enables astronomers to utilize such suns as universe lighthouses or accurate measuring points for the further exploration of distant star clusters. By this technique it is possible to measure stellar distances most precisely up to more than one million light-years." (459)
By observing the behavior of these variable stars (called Cepheid variables) in our Milky Way galaxy, and calibrating their brightness against distance from us, Leavitt could then estimate the distance to any Cepheid variable simply by measuring its brightness. And her calibration of the brightness/distance relationship, because it was made using nearby stars, could be done by methods known to surveyors, with some even being known to the Egyptians 5000 years ago.
Thus the dubious constants used for say, the red shift method, had no part in the erroneous measurement of one million light years to Andromeda as announced by Hubble in 1929.
So why has the modern distance to Andromeda more than doubled? Because in 1951, Walter Baade discovered that there is more than one class of Cepheid variable star and that those used by Hubble in Andromeda had a brightness-distance relationship quite different from those used by Leavitt in the Milky Way. Thus the error has nothing to do with the value of dubious constants but was simply an observer error made during development of a new technique.
This story has long been well known amongst amateur astronomer groups and may be checked by any Urantia fundamentalist simply by asking.
An important question we must ask is why the revelators appear to have been at such pains to ensure that, over time, it would progressively become more and more impossible for the Urantia Papers as a whole, to be imposed upon intelligent people as the authoritative word of God.
One reason may be because of the sovereignty of our free will: "Having thus provided for the growth of the immortal soul and having liberated man's inner self from the fetters of absolute dependence on antecedent causation, the Father stands aside…No other being, force, creator, or agency in all the wide universe of universes can interfere to any degree with the absolute sovereignty of the mortal free will, as it operates within the realms of choice, regarding the eternal destiny of the personality of the choosing mortal. As pertains to eternal survival, God has decreed the sovereignty of the material and mortal will, and that decree is absolute." (71)
Imagine this: We live under a despotic king who has informed us that provided we accept doing his will absolutely in every detail, we will be rewarded with a knighthood and a castle--but if we reject his offer, we face certain death. Do we really have a free will choice??
Any absolutely certain knowledge we might have about even the existence of a God restricts our free will--for if there is a God, surely we have to ask ourselves what might he want from us?
At the other extreme, if our desire is for a God who is perfect goodness and perfect love and we are prepared to live our lives according to what we believe his will to be, even if he may eventually prove to be non-existent, then surely we would have made a truly meritorious free will decision--one with o thought of reward, no dangling carrot.
|
|
