Classifications

Each topic is classified into one of three categories: Class A, Class B, or Class C. These categories are designed to help visitors efficiently get to the strongest corroborations and to provide a quick understanding of why each topic fits into its given classification. Though the methodology for classification, by its nature, cannot be precise and is subject to interpretation, various issues can be identified to help visitors appreciate how the choice is made to place reports into one of the three categories. The following types of questions guide this process:

1. How many correlations can be made between The Urantia Book's statements about the topic and new scientific understandings that have developed?
2. How precise are the correlations?
3. Did some portion of the scholarly community either agree with or speculate about the assertions made by The Urantia Book?
4. How precise are the statements made by The Urantia Book and how precise is the science on this topic?
5. Is the topic now generally considered to be a settled topic within the scholarly community?
6. How comprehensible and accessible is the subject matter to a person who does not have expertise in the field?
7. How long did it take science to catch up to the assertions made by The Urantia Book?

Class A Reports

Adam and Eve: This report focuses on genetics research that was published after the year 2000. This research parallels The Urantia Book's story about Adam and Eve in four ways. Additionally, it also correlates with its story about the origins of humanity. (The Urantia Book says that Adam and Eve upgraded human genetics, not that they were the first human beings.) Because this report correlates to two different stories about human history in multiple ways and does so regarding new discoveries in genetics that no one was talking about when The Urantia Book was published in 1955, this is a Class A report.

Garden of Eden: The Urantia Book says that the Garden of Eden was a peninsula that jutted out from the eastern Mediterranean coast and that this peninsula sank to the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea 33,000 years ago. Many details are given about the size and shape of the peninsula. When The Urantia Book was published in 1955, we did not have a clear picture of the topography of the bottom of the Mediterranean, which is about 4,000 feet deep in this area. There were only sporadic depth readings at specific points. We now have detailed topographic maps of the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea that reveal a formation that matches The Urantia Book's description of the Garden of Eden in every detail. Nothing else along the coast even comes close to matching the description. Additionally, this formation is precisely at the convergence of three very active tectonic plates and tectonic plate theory was not invented until about a decade after The Urantia Book was published.

Magnetic Sensitivity: The Urantia Book states that all organisms have a biologic sensitivity to the earth's magnetic field and that this sensitivity is right on the edge of human consciousness. At the time of its publication, scientists did not generally believe that biologic organisms could have a mechanism that is sensitive to such a subtle electromagnetic field. Now many migrating animals have been found to possess such sensitivity and some researchers assert that human beings also can sense the earth's magnetic field.

The Urantia Book asserts that the “bodies” responsible for this sensitivity were being discovered right around the time of The Urantia Book's narration, which it asserts was in the mid 1930's. In the mid 1930's scientists did discover that ampullae in a sharks snout had tiny inner ear type hairs and that there were nerves running from these ampullae to the brain. They could also tell that sharks were sensitive to electric fields. But it took until the 1960's, over five years after The Urantia Book's publication, to discover that the mechanism in these ampullae were extremely sensitive to electromagnetic fields.

Additionally, in the 1960's it was discovered that many animals, including humans, produce a substance called “magnetite,” which is the most magnetically sensitive substance on earth. Magnetite produced in biologic organisms is shaped more cubically than octagonally (the way it otherwise occurs in the mineral world), which allows these tiny particles to line up like bar magnets within cells. It was previously believed that biologic organisms could not produce this substance.

This report just barely makes it into the Class A category. However, advancements in this field are clearly headed in the direction of lending additional support to this report.

Class B Reports

Early Migration to the Americas: At the time The Urantia Book was published in 1955 and for decades afterwards, the predominant theory regarding when human beings migrated to the American continents was that this occurred about 11,500 years ago by way of a Bering Strait land bridge. By the late 1980's and early 1990's this position started to lose a lot of support because of various sites discovered in North and South America that indicated the presence of human habitation dating back 40,000 to 60,000 years. The oldest site that indicates human presence is in Brazil, which is also the farthest distance from Alaska of the ancient sites that have been discovered. Because researchers in this field have not yet developed a collective and definitive position on the issue of when migration across the Bering Strait land bridge occurred and other theories about migration by boat have some support, this report is placed in Class B.

Inner Ionosphere: The Urantia Book states that there is an “inner ionosphere” below the stratosphere. Though such a region is not yet classified by scientists, in the late 1980's and early 1990's substantial documentation was produced of a luminescent phenomenon that shoots out of the top of thunderclouds and typically rises no higher than the lower part of the stratosphere. Luminescence in the atmosphere is generally indicative of ionic activity. Scientists are still having a hard time explaining this phenomenon, which bodes well for The Urantia Book's assertion.

What is especially intriguing about this report is that there were articles published by Harlan Stetson in the first half of the twentieth century that so closely parallel The Urantia Book's statements about earth's atmosphere (line by line for a couple of paragraphs) that there is a very strong indication that Stetson's work was used by the authors of The Urantia Book as a guide for the presentation of its depiction of this material. Though Stetson refers to the ionosphere as being above the stratosphere (consistent with the then and current position by the vast majority of scientists in this field), The Urantia Book departs from this obvious source material by denominating a new region below the stratosphere. Because of this departure, the documentation of this phenomenon, called “blue jets,” is especially intriguing. It is anticipated that this report will be updated before long and placed in the Class A category as additional research in this field develops an explanation for the presence of this newly discovered type of atmospheric luminescence.

Pangaea to Plate Tectonics: Continental drift was not widely accepted by science until the theories of sea floor spreading and plate tectonics were developed within about a decade after The Urantia Book was published. But continental drift was around as a theory long before The Urantia Book was published. The Urantia Book refers to continental drift extensively. It makes other statements that are consistent with sea floor spreading and plate tectonics, though it does not get overly specific about these now widely accepted models of geologic activity.

The Garden of Eden Report supports putting this in the Class B category because of that topic’s relationship to plate tectonics.

Vikings is a Class B report because:

1. It pertains to several assertions in The Urantia Book that have now been amply verified and accept by the vast majority of scholars. Specifically, when contact with the Native American population by the white race of Europeans occurred.
2. When The Urantia Book was published in 1955 only a small minority of scholars had strong opinions in support of The Urantia Book's position. Notwithstanding that writings from around 1300 A.D. asserted that the Vikings landed in North America just before 1000 A.D., these “sagas” were highly suspect because they were not firsthand accounts, having been passed down by oral tradition for hundreds of years before being penned and because no artifacts or other physical evidence had been discovered at time of The Urantia Book's publication.
3. Today numerous archeological finds exist, which verify The Urantia Book's assertions and which are accepted by the vast majority of scholars on this subject as proof of the issues at hand.
4. This corroboration interrelates with the Early Migration to the Americas Report. More than one aspect of the history of the Native American population provided in The Urantia Book, which was generally rejected when it was published, now finds support with the majority of scholars.

Class C Reports

Galaxies: Who's Counting: The Urantia Book says that in the “not-distant future” our instruments will see no less than 375 million galaxies. The Hubble Space Telescope, launched (and then repaired) in the early 1990's has made this statement more than true. Estimates of the number of observable galaxies now range over 100 billion. Even though this statement has come true, it is placed in the Class C category because this prediction is not considered to be a particularly unlikely prediction.

Mercury's Rotation: The Urantia Book, in discussing how tidal friction will eventually slow the rotation of orbiting bodies to stop, does not state that Mercury has come to a stop, even though it lists Mercury as one of the best examples of this gravitational effect. It does, however, give the moon as an example of an orbiting body that has stopped its rotation due to the effect of tidal friction. At the time The Urantia Book was published, it was universally believed that Mercury’s axial rotation had come to a stop. A decade after The Urantia Book's publication scientists discovered that Mercury still has a very slow rotation. Because The Urantia Book simply avoided agreeing with science that was bad at the time, this is placed in the Class C category.

Tycho's Nova: On the one hand, The Urantia Book gives some very specific information about Tycho's Nova, and it required significant technological advances and the development of complex scientific analysis to corroborate The Urantia Book's assertion. It took decades after The Urantia Book's publication in 1955 for astronomers to catch up, and there was not speculation in the scientific community either way about Tycho's Nova having a double star origin prior to 1955.

On the other hand, this is a single-issue topic. The Urantia Book makes just one statement on this specific subject. Additionally, there can be no direct observation of the assertion that a double star system gave rise to the supernova; once a supernova occurs the opportunity to observe it is gone and Tycho's Nova occurred hundreds of years ago, long before we had the technology to directly observe whether it originated as a double star. Therefore, forensic analysis is required to make assertions about its origin.

Uniquely Classified