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Cosmic Reflections. A response to some of the Gardner criticisms.
Ken Glasziou
In his book Urantia: The Great Cult Mystery, Martin Gardner has used all the tricks of his trade of debunking in his efforts to ridicule the science content of The Urantia Book. For example, from the late 1920's to the late 1950's, Wegener's theory of continental drift was held in disrepute among geologists, and particularly so in the USA. The theory proposed that approximately 200 million years ago, all the land masses of the earth were joined together and commenced to drift apart at that time. So if, as claimed by Gardner, Wilfred Kellogg and Dr Sadler were conspirators in the production of the Urantia Papers, why did they include an account of continental drift far exceeding Wegener's in its detail and nominating the time of commencement of drift at the vastly different date of 750 million years ago?
Gardner was aware that, by the 1980's, geologists had begun to shift Wegener's 'about 200 million years ago' proposal for commencement of breakup of a supercontinent to somewhere between 500 and 800 million years. He cannot deny his awareness since, in his book, he quotes from a paper on the science content of The Urantia Book which remarks on the book's claim for a 750 million years ago start of land mass break-up. Gardner attempts to divert attention from this remarkable "prediction" by claiming that Wegener's theory was acclaimed by some geologists in the early 1920's. Therefore, says Gardner, Dr Sadler must have written it into the book at that time, then could not remove it when the theory fell into disrepute because the Forum would have noticed the change. Note that elsewhere in his book, Gardner uses the opposite logic and claims that Dr Sadler added much new material. Apparently, the Forum no longer noticed alterations and deletions!
At the present time, geologists have now modified their views to a commencing time for drift at about 750 million years ago, the same as given in the Urantia Paper received in 1934. And now, in a letter to me dated Novemeber 21, 1995, Gardner acknowledges the convergence of those dates for commencement of drift but ignores their significance and again attempts to divert attention by referring to a statement in the book that 500 million years ago was the start of the long and slow westward drift of north and south America. Gardner says that this is twice the age assigned by geologists for this event.
However, once more Gardner has missed the boat. In the December issue (vol. 270, no. 5242) of the journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science we read, "Geologists have been mystified by the wanderings of North America during a crucial period 500 million years ago, when many of the life forms known today were evolving. Now a chunk of crust in western Argentina is turning out to be North America's calling card. Dropped off in western South America nearly 500 million years ago, it pins down the errant North America to within a few thousand kilometers of South America's west coast."
Gardner goofs again
Quoting from Gardner's Urantia: The Great Cult Mystery: "The Life Carrier of Nebadon, assigned to Urantia, in his description of the Cambrian period (Paper 59, page 674), made a glaring mistake. He makes crustaceans such as shrimps, crabs and lobsters contemporaneous with trilobites, when actually the crustaceans appeared on Urantia much later. A few Urantians have tried to justify this howler by saying that it was a typing or printing error. The Life Carrier, they suggest, originally wrote, 'ancestors of crustaceans.' It seems far more likely that the author of the paper did some careless copying from a book on historical geology."
Without implying that The Urantia Book's account of historical geology is, for the most part, anything other than being in line with mid-1930's opinions, let's correct the Gardner criticism. Modern historical geology refers to the period between 550 and 520 million years ago as "the Cambrian explosion" in which most of the basic body plans found in today's invertebrates appeared in an extraordinary burst of evolutionary change (J. Hecht, New Scientist 148 (No. 2006) 23 (1995). An account of the current viewpoint appeared in Time Magazine vol 146 (23) 1995 that states, "Until about 600 million years ago, there were no organisms more complex than bacteria, multi-celled algae, and single celled plankton...Then, 543 million years ago, in the early Cambrian, within the span of no more than 10 million years, creatures with teeth and tentacles, claws and jaws materialized with the suddenness of apparitions. In a burst of creativity like nothing before or since, nature appears to have sketched out the blueprints for virtually the whole of the animal kingdom."
Since the trilobites did not become extinct until the very end of the Paleozoic, about 250 million years ago, it would appear then that trilobites and crustaceans were contemporaneous after all. Some howler!
The book tells us that 550 million years ago the Life Carriers initiated the original life patterns of this world and planted them in hospitable waters (667). It also tells us that "the original life plasm of an evolutionary world must contain the full potential for all future developmental changes and modifications." (398) This appears to be "missing gap" information as described by the mandate. (1110)
The book defines "life" on Urantia as an "unbalanced equilibrium of energies and
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