Meredith Sprunger's Synopsis of The Urantia Book
Synopsis of Paper 58
LIFE ESTABLISHMENT ON Urantia
1. In all Satania there are only sixty‑one worlds similar to Urantia, life‑modification planets ...about one world in ten is designated as a decimal planet ...on such planets we are permitted to undertake certain life experiments in an effort to modify or possibly improve the standard universe types of living beings.
2. The Satania Life Carriers had projected a sodium chloride pattern of life; therefore no steps could be taken toward, planting it until the ocean waters had become sufficiently briny. The Urantia type of protoplasm can function only in a suitable salt solution ...Your primitive ancestors freely circulated about in the salty ocean; today, this same oceanlike salty solution freely circulates about in your bodies.
3. These ancient inland seas were seldom over five or six hundred feet deep, and sunlight can penetrate ocean water for more than six hundred feet. And it was from such seashores of the mild and equable climes of a later age that primitive plant life found its way onto the land...Though this atmosphere was then ideal for plant growth, it contained such a high degree of carbon dioxide that no animal, much less man, could have lived on the face of the earth.
4. The planetary atmosphere filters through to the earth about one two‑billionths of the sun's total light emanation. If the light falling upon North America were paid for at the rate of two cents per kilowatt‑hour, the annual light bill would be upward. of 800 quadrillion dollars. Chicago's bill for sunshine would amount to considerably over 100 million dollar a day.
5. The earth's atmosphere is all but opaque to much of the solar radiation at the extreme ultraviolet end of the spectrum. Most of these short wave lengths are absorbed by a layer of ozone ...this relatively small and apparently insignificant amount of ozone protects Urantia inhabitants from the excess of these dangerous and destructive ultraviolet radiations present in sunlight. But were this ozone layer just a trifle thicker, you would be deprived of the highly important and health‑giving ultraviolet rays ...which are ancestral to one of the most essential of your vitamins.
6. And yet some of the less imaginative of your mortal mechanists insist on viewing material creation and human evolution as an accident. The Urantia midwayers have assembled. over fifty thousand facts of physics and chemistry which they deem to be incompatible with the laws of accidental chance, and which they contend unmistakably demonstrate the presence of intelligent purpose in the material creation.
7. Were it not for the "blanketing" effect of the atmosphere at night, heat would be lost by radiation so rapidly that life would be impossible of maintenance except by artificial provision.
8. Auroral phenomena are directly related to sunspots ...Therefore do you have the greatest auroral phenomena when sunspots are at their height—or soon thereafter—at which time the spots are more generally equatorially situated. Even the compass needle is responsive to this solar influence since it turns slightly to the east as the sun rises and lightly to the west as the sun nears setting.
9. The vast hydrogen clouds are veritable cosmic chemical laboratories, harboring all phases of evolving energy and. metamorphosing matter ...These energy conditions of space are germane to the essential environment of life establishment, but they are not effective in the subsequent modification of the inheritance factors of the germ plasm as are some of the longer rays of radiant energy. The implanted life of the Life Carriers is fully resistant to all of this amazing flood of the short space rays of universe energy.
10. Urantia life is unique, original with the planet ...all life appearing hereon was formulated by us right here on the planet; and there is no other world in all Satania, even in all Nebadon, that has a life existence just like that of Urantia.
11. 550,000,000 years ago the Life Carrier corps ...organized and initiated the original life patterns of this world and planted them in the hospitable waters of the realm... These three life implantations have been designated as: the central or Eurasian‑.African, the eastern or Australasian, and the western, embracing Greenland and the Americas.
12. Our purpose in making three marine‑life implantations was to insure that each great land mass would carry this life with it, in its warm‑water seas, as the land subsequently separated. We foresaw that in the later era of the emergence of land life large oceans of water would. separate these drifting continental land masses.
13. The outer one thousand miles of the earth's mass consists principally of different kinds of rock. Underneath are the denser and heavier metallic elements ...The outer crust was about forty‑miles thick. This outer shell was supported by, and. rested directly upon, a molten sea of basalt of varying thickness...Were it not for this protective condition, the more severe earthquakes would literally shake the world to pieces. Earthquakes are caused by sliding and shifting of the solid outer‑crust and not by volcanoes.
14. The sea bottoms are more dense than the land masses, and this is what keeps the continents above water...But all continents tend to creep into the oceans.
15. 450,000,000 years ago the transition from vegetable to animal life occurred ...And this development, all of which was inherent in the original life patterns, came about gradually. There were many transitional stages between the early primitive vegetable forms of life and. the later well‑defined animal organisms. Even today the transition slime molds persist, and. they can hardly be classified either as plants or as animals.
16. From era to era radically new species of animal life arise. They do not evolve as the result of the gradual accumulation of small variations; they appear as full-fledged and new orders of life, and they appear suddenly. The sudden appearance of new species and diversified orders of living organisms is wholly biologic, strictly natural. There is nothing supernatural connected with these genetic mutations.
17. The physiologic equipment and the anatomic structure of all new orders of life are in response to the action of physical law, but the subsequent endowment of mind is a bestowal of the adjutant mind‑spirits in accordance with innate brain capacity. Mind, while not a physical evolution, is wholly dependent on the brain capacity afforded by purely physical and evolutionary developments.
18. The vast group of rock systems which constituted the outer crust of the world during the life‑dawn or Proterozoic era does not now appear at many points on the earth's surface...Fossils of this era yield algae, corallike plants, primitive Protozoa, and spongelike transition organisms ...In North America this ancient and primitive fossil-bearing stone layer comes to the surface over the eastern, central, and northern regions of Canada. There is also an intermittent east‑west ridge of this rock which extends from Pennsylvania and the ancient Adirondack Mountains on west through Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. Other ridges run from Newfoundland to Alabama and from Alaska to Mexico ...none are so easy to interpretation as those about Lake Superior and in the Grand Canyon of the Colorado River.
19. The lava flows of this age brought much iron, copper, and lead up near the planetary surface. There are few places on the earth where such activities are more graphically shown than in the St. Croix valley of Wisconsin.
20. In these early ages when much land was near sea level, there occurred many successive submergences and emergences...Much of the older sandstone and conglomerates represents the sedimentary accumulations of these ancient shores ...This era witnesses the spread of life throughout the waters of the world; marine life has become well established on Urantia. The bottoms of the shallow and extensive inland seas are being gradually overrun by a profuse and luxuriant growth of vegetation, while the shore‑line waters are swarming with the simple forms of animal life.
21. Many of these ancient sea beds are now elevated high upon land and their deposits of age upon age tell the story of the life struggles of those early days. It is literally true, as your poet said, "The dust we tread upon was once alive."
Discussion Questions1. With all of the irregularities of our world, are we fortunate or unfortunate to be a life-modification planet?
2. Why is the knowledge of the scientific properties of matter important in understanding mental and spiritual values?
3. Should our scientists be compiling as list of facts that strongly suggest that intelligent purpose is behind planetary phenomena?
4. How might the discovery of the powerful short space-energy change the way we live?
5. Why aren’t Life Carriers allowed to help the evolutionary process?
6. Do you think the celestial creator of the evolutionary process designed such things as genetic mutations or is this just an inherent aspect of biological development?
7. Will the eventual widespread knowledge of the Urantia Synopsis of Papers inspire geologists to more completely read the “stone book” of the world?
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The Urantia Book Fellowship