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fiery inferno…."
Modern science finds no evidence to support these assertions. And 3 paragraphs further down:
"Presently the atmosphere became more settled and cooled sufficiently to start precipitation of rain on the hot rocky surface of the planet. For thousands of years Urantia was enveloped in one vast and continuous blanket of steam. And during these ages the sun never shone upon the earth's surface."
There is much contrary evidence to this statement which will be covered later.
Lastly on paragraph 3 of page 660 we have:
"1,000,000,000 years ago is the date of the actual beginning of Urantia history. The planet has attained approximately its present size."
The Urantia Book statement on page 656 that our planetary system first evolved 4,500,000,000 years ago is remarkably close to the deduction from radiometric data carried out in 1955 by C.C. Patterson using the lead isotopes in chondritic meteoric materials which put their age at 4.5 billion years. Later, Patterson also put the age of our planet at 4.56 billion years.
Patterson's figure was verified as being close to reality when the latest radiometric techniques were applied to the 382 kilograms of moon rocks comprised of 2415 individual samples brought back by the Apollo program to the moon from 1969 onwards. Further samples were also available from the Russian moon program. The oldest moon rock among these samples was found to be nearly 4.6 billion years which is just about as old as the oldest Earth rocks. These studies included the use of oxygen isotope ratios on both moon and earth rocks which demonstrated that the Earth and its moon have a common ancestry--that is they are constructed from the same pool of source materials.
In the paragraph covering the 2,000,000,000 to 1,500,000,000 years period the Urantia Papers' authors (here the Life Carriers) inform us: "The radium clock is your most reliable time piece for making scientific estimates of the age of the planet…" (note: uranium to lead is now the preferred clock)
This finally turned out to be a truly prophetic statement but not until such time as zircon crystals, plus advanced technology such as the use of ion probes towards the end of the second millennium A.D., permitted the construction of the history of individual zircons to be revealed with an unprecedented accuracy of one million in three billion1 years. In many cases this same history could be used to clarify much more than just the history of the zircon.
Conclusions drawn with the aid of isotopic and geophysical data are:
1. The moon is not a primordial object; it is an evolved terrestrial planet with internal zoning similar to that of the Earth.
Before Apollo the state of the moon was a subject of almost unlimited speculation. We now know that the moon is made of rocky material that has been variously melted, erupted through volcanoes, and crushed by meteorite impacts. It possess a thick crust (60 km), a fairly uniform lithosphere (60--1000 km), and a partly liquid asthenosphere (1000-1740 km); a small iron core at the bottom of the asthenosphere is possible but unconfirmed.. Some rocks give hints for ancient magnetic fields although no planetary field exists today.
2. The moon is ancient and still preserves an early history (the first billion years) that must be common to all terrestrial planets.
The extensive record of meteorite craters on the moon, when calibrated using absolute ages of rock samples, provides a key for unraveling time scales for the geologic evolution of Mercury, Venus, and Mars based on their individual crater records.
3. The oldest moon rocks are virtually as old as the oldest Earth rocks. The earliest processes and events that probably affected both planetary bodies can now only be found on the moon.
Moon rock ages range from about 3.2 billion years in the maria (dark solidified lava plains) to nearly 4.6 billion years in the light rugged highlands.
4. The moon and Earth are genetically related and formed from different proportions of a common reservoir of materials.
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