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remarkable evidence for statements (Paper 61, Sections 1,2 ) about the ancestors of Australia's kangaroos and the land bridges of 35 to 45 million years ago. Yet when the Papers were written in the 1930's, geologists or paleontologists who supported the notion of continental drift would have been labeled as mavericks. All of which raises the question of why the authors of the Urantia Papers would have written such material except they possessed knowledge unavailable on Urantia.
Radiometric chemistry: Age of the Solar System
At the beginning of Paper 57 in which the breakup up of a supercontinent and continental drift is introduced, there is another remarkable snippet of information. In this Paper we are told that the beginning of our solar system occurred 4.5 billion years ago. Until the mid-1950's no firm evidence existed that could confirm or deny such a statement, a range being given from about six thousand years by Creationists to six billion or more by cosmologists. The first radiometric dating of meteoric material was performed in 1955 by Claire Patterson who studied the lead isotopes in chondritic meteorite material. The result indicated an age of about 4.5 billion years as given in the Urantia Paper of 1934/5. This remains as the accepted age at 2001 AD.
Comments
There is absolutely no way that in 1955, the printing plates of The Urantia Book (published 1955) could have been altered to accommodate Dr Patterson's work. For starters it would have been foolish to do so for there was no certainty that the dating of a chondritic meteorite gave the correct age for the solar system. Secondly, the making of a metal printing plate was a time consuming and expensive business. For The Urantia Book, each circular plate was cast so as to turn out sixteen pages with each turn of the press.5 Lastly, in 1955 a considerable group of people was both studying the Papers and checking for possible typographic errors that could be corrected in a later printing. It would have been impossible to accomplish such a change in secrecy. At this stage of proceedings any attempt to make substantial changes to the plates would have resulted in a furor and would have been well known throughout the Urantia movement..
So much of the story of our planet in the Urantia Papers relates to the story of continental drift that if the drift story had turned out to be a fiasco, The Urantia Book would surely have disappeared from circulation many years ago. Except that they had access to privileged information, the authors went out on a long light limb when they opted for continental drift--and they embraced it so whole heartedly that they located themselves at the very end of that limb.
However, a word of caution. The chances of correct guessing for this small selection of prophetic material are so slight that only a totally shut mind would reject their significance. But the reason for including prophetic material is not so obvious. In terms of what was known in the 1930's period, the cosmology content of the Papers was adequate and provided for a conceptual "universe frame in which to think" (Paper 115, Section 1) that was suitable for the next thirty or so years. Today it is outdated and will become increasingly so. The good side of this is that it will ensure a label of infallibility and authority cannot be sustained--for even those with a reasonable level of high school education will recognize the outdated state of its cosmology. The bad side is that many may turn away from the book without giving it due consideration and thus miss out on its genuinely valuable religious and spiritual contributions.
So why was prophetic material included? The most likely reason appears to be that once the cosmology became outdated and recognized as such, those who might otherwise reject the work without ever looking for themselves nevertheless could be provided with an incentive to ignore the error and read the Papers for what they were intended--their intrinsic spiritual and religious value.
References
1. K.S. Thorne, (1994) Black Holes and Time Warps. (Picador, London)
2. Encyclopedia Britannica (2000)
3. J. Gribbin, Genesis, (1982)
4. W.D. Dalziel, Earth before Pangea, Scientific American 272 (1) 28. (1995)
5. L..J Mullins and M.J. Sprunger. (2000) A History of the Urantia Papers. (Penumbra Press, Boulder.)
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