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Presently the whole of the moon's surface is pock-marked by impact craters and gigantic lava flows and, thanks to the Apollo missions, the basaltic rock sampled from these flows on the surface of the moon has been dated back to from 3.1 to 3.9 billion years ago. These are facts that are simply incompatible with the story provided in the Papers.
The factuality of our present analysis is readily confirmable by almost anyone prepared to take the trouble. No knowledge of science or any other specialized knowledge is required to see that The Urantia Book's account of the evolution of the earth-moon system is simply impossibly wrong.
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." (P. 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 no thought of reward, no dangling carrot.
If you were God, what would you want of your created children? Anyone prepared to delve deeply into that question will surely come to understand why we, God's earthly children, cannot be given a divine, authoritative revelation, and why we must labor midst uncertainty in order to ultimately attain a truly worthwhile goal of eternal life.
But does that not still leave us floundering with an unanswered question--how can we mere mortals be expected to distinguish revelation from error and the mundane? Simple--revelation always has spiritual value. And error? Never!
Reference
Scientific American, Volume 289, No. 6 (2003) The New Moon.
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