APPENDIX A
We know that the celestial authors of the UB skillfully wove human sources into their revelations, but their revelatory efforts with regard to cosmology and the physical sciences must have been an exceedingly complex editorial challenge. As I understanding their mandate, they were required to coordinate the very best human knowledge in these fields with a limited set of revelations about the physical universe, while at the same time not over-revealing in such a way as to stymie scientific curiosity and discovery. The result is that the text offers its disclosures about the physical universe in the phraseology of the scientific discoveries accepted at the time the UB was authored (in the 1920s and 1930s), yet it is also clear that these Papers go far beyond the cosmological paradigm of that generation of scientists. (The primary Papers concerning astrophysics and cosmology are 11, 12, 32, 41, and 42.) This approach, I believe, will inspire future scientific discovery but will also serve the overall evolution of human consciousness.
With regard to astrophysics, the UB’s revelatory descriptions appear to match and possibly transcend today’s human knowledge of this field some eight decades later, but these statements also appear alongside now-outdated information from a bygone era in the history of science. According to veteran UB student and amateur astronomer John Causland, “The book’s astronomy is phrased in the language in use at the time. . . . [Yet] with some amazement, I began to see that the Urantia cosmology actually told a story suggestive of a physical universe that only now we’re beginning to comprehend.” (See www.UBastronomy.com).
Causland suggests that the revelators must have timed their teachings to coincide with the work of astronomers such as Edwin Hubble, who was the first to discover the existence of galaxies outside the Milky Way. Causland speculates that before the UB’s celestial authors would have been permitted to reveal the size, structure, and age of our universe, our scientists would first have had to “earn” some rudimentary knowledge of the existence of far-flung galaxies and other large-scale formations outside of our own galaxy. This occurred with Hubble’s first measurements, dating back to 1929, including his crucial discovery of the so-called red shift—a finding which proves that other galaxies and structures not only exist, but are rapidly receding away from one another.
Causland states that because the revelators had to utilize human sources around whose limited vision they could weave specific revelatory information, they also provided confusing or ambiguous indications about this extragalactic universe of universes. In following their mandate to not reveal too much, they seem to have unnecessarily muddied the waters with quantitative data that is now known to be quite far off. The celestial authors also incorporated and blended several contradictory models of the universe extant in the early twentieth century. Further, they used terms such as “nebula,” “galaxy,” and “universe” almost interchangeably, as scientists did at that time; today these words have far more distinct meanings. Due to such complicating factors, the Urantia Book’s strictly physical cosmology is no longer reliable in a number of details.
For example, the Urantia text offers two apparently contradictory models of what constitutes a superuniverse (the most important large-scale unit of the inhabited evolutionary universe, which is discussed in chapter 2 and also in the Supplement in Section 2). Some passages in the UB depict our superuniverse, named Orvonton, as coextensive with the Milky Way galaxy, while other statements strongly (and accurately) imply that Orvonton is vastly greater in size.
Causland goes on to show that our superuniverse simply cannot be a single galaxy that contains a trillion inhabited planets, as some interpreters of the UB believe. (As a reminder, the UB states that there are seven superuniverses, each containing about one trillion inhabited worlds.) Instead, Orvonton is most properly a designation for a massive clump of thousands of galaxies now known to be the Virgo Supercluster. At his website, Causland lists other superclusters with names such as Perseus, Centaur, and Formax. These vast formations of thousands of galaxies seem to be equivalents of the Virgo Group and thus are candidates for entry into the catalogue of the seven great inhabited superuniverses.
It is my own speculation that the superclusters that have been clearly identified by astronomers may well be the ultimate constituents of the evolving inhabited universe known in the UB as the grand universe. Our own Milky Way galaxy (a minor sector in UB terminology), which contains a mere billion inhabited worlds, is but a small unit of Orvonton.
John Causland makes one more fascinating point: Some astrophysicists appear to have settled on the idea that the universe may contain a gravitational center, which may be akin to the central universe, the heart of which is Paradise (and which we are told is the cosmic source of all material gravity). Since the 1980s, astronomers have called this center the “Great Attractor” and describe it as an unbelievably massive gravitational vortex toward which the great superclusters are moving.