Numerous investigators have tried to determine who “wrote” The Urantia Papers. The federal courts may have settled this question after a decade of litigation. Because forensic evidence of human authorship could not be provided at trial, the Urantia Foundation’s copyright was struck down and the UB quietly entered the public domain in 2005.
The UB seems to many to be revelatory in a general sense, but not every passage is by any means “pure revelation.” In particular, much of the science and cosmology provided in the text is not depicted by the celestial authors as “inspired.” Yet, compared to the mythic and pre-modern content of the scriptures that accompany most of the world’s religious traditions, the UB’s cosmological and historical accounts are strikingly modern and remarkably useful and plausible; they facilitate, for example, an advanced grasp of theology, philosophy of religion, and cosmology—even as many of the text’s statements about science and cosmology are slowly go out of date.
But even with its self-imposed restrictions on revealing “unearned knowledge,” much of the UB’s elucidation on such topics as geology, physics, astrophysics, and evolutionary biology remains ahead of its time even today, and some of it can rightly be considered “prophetic.” It is notable that, for the last four decades, advanced students of the Urantia text with scientific backgrounds have presented papers at scientific symposia organized by Urantia-movement organizations.
Equally important is the fact that the revelators brought to bear unusual literary techniques: In addition to their plan for ongoing interaction with a closed group of hundreds of humans during the drafting process, they also state that they had recourse to the best ideas of all humans, deceased or living, in constructing the text. As broached previously, the revelators—acting in accord with their “revelation mandate”—were required to judiciously combine revealed knowledge with earned knowledge, that is, their own selections of the most advanced human concepts. Some of these humanly sourced ideas retain heuristic value and express crucial ideas that remain pertinent today. For good reasons, however, the Urantia text cannot be said to be inerrant.
This revelatory method appears to have been designed to prevent the all-too-human-tendency to fetishize a purported “sacred text.” As the revelators write in the Acknowledgement section of the Foreword, their charter was as follows:
[To] give preference to the highest existing human concepts pertaining to the subjects to be presented. We may resort to pure revelation only when the concept of presentation has had no adequate previous expression by the human mind.… Accordingly, in making these presentations about God and his universe associates, we have selected as the basis of these Papers more than one thousand human concepts representing the highest and most advanced planetary knowledge of spiritual values and universe meanings. Wherein these human concepts, assembled from the God-knowing mortals of the past and the present, are inadequate to portray the truth as we are directed to reveal it, we will unhesitatingly supplement them, for this purpose drawing upon our own superior knowledge. (0:12.11)
In other words, the first three parts of the Urantia Revelation weave within its pages selections from more than one thousand human concepts that correlate and harmonize with the revealed knowledge that was mandated to be conveyed to humankind.