Urantia Book Source Studies

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 An understanding of the first area requires knowledge of: (1) the various personalities of the divine hierarchy who are involved in creating, designing, and bestowing the components of our being, and (2) the importance and longevity of these various components—physical, intellectual, and spiritual—as we progress from the material to the morontial and spiritual levels in our ascension career.

Parts I and II of the Urantia Book—especially Papers 1, 7, 8, 16, 21, 32, 34, 36, 40, 47, 49, 50, 51, 52, and 55—are the primary sources of information regarding the divine scheme of mortal creation and evolution and how it normally unfolds. Through some of these papers we learn that the differentiation of a planet’s human stock into various colored races is one of several temporary diversifications designed by the Life Carriers, an order of local-universe-origin celestial beings. Race is thus an ephemeral factor of identity, and racial differences normally exist only in the early history of a planet and in the earliest stages of the ascension career. In contrast to these temporary, material-based identity factors, we are told that the more fundamental and permanent components of our being derive from Paradise-origin personalities. These latter components underlie and, as the ascension career progresses, eventually override the handicaps and advantages of material heredity.

A study of the roles and functions of the superhuman personalities responsible for fostering the evolution and perfection of mortal creatures and the civilizations of our native planets, suggests that a clear distinction can be drawn between the agendas of the Paradise-origin personalities and those of the local-universe-origin personalities. Paradise-origin beings endow humans with capacities for infinite spiritual growth and, in their bestowals upon evolving planets, seek to engender in us the realization of our transcendent spiritual equality. The local-universe-origin beings, by contrast, work to advance a planet’s civilization by maximizing the physical, intellectual and spiritual caliber of its inhabitants. Paradise Sons are concerned with our eternal essence and infinite destiny; local-universe-origin administrators focus on our hereditary substance and the finite destiny of our native planets. Paradise-origin beings ignore such material differentials as race; local-universe-origin beings design these differentials and seek to manipulate them in the most effective ways to advance a planet and its inhabitants towards the attainment of light and life.

Ordinarily, we are told, these differing agendas work harmoniously. The progress of an inhabited planet in its earlier epochs is directly fostered by administrators from the local universe—a Planetary Prince and a pair of Material Sons. These beings raise the planet’s peoples to high physical and intellectual levels through a program of selective reproduction and racial amalgamation. Eventually, a highly ethical civilization emerges, which is characterized by a collective sense of brotherhood realized on both genetic and spiritual levels. A planet is then ripe for periodic visitations by Paradise Sons who come to further spiritualize the populace. Through the combined efforts of the Paradise Sons and the local universe Sons, a planet reaches the highest possible levels of civilization, thereby achieving its destiny of light and life.

We are told that while the Paradise Sons never fail in their missions, the planetary rulers of local universe origin are fallible and may derail the divine program of planetary evolution through the embrace of error and sin. Our former Planetary Prince and Material Sons succumbed respectively to rebellion and default, and our planet is suffering from a variety of biological, social and cultural ills as a consequence. Normally, a planet which has hosted a Paradise bestowal Son is one in which "[t]here are no race or color problems; literally all nations and races are of one blood" (UB 594; 52:4.1). Our planet’s postbestowal age, however, has been marked by the persistence of racial, national, cultural, ideological, religious and linguistic divisions. Instead of having the advantage of experiencing our spiritual equality and brotherhood as a racially and culturally unified world population, we are forced to divide our consciousness into an awareness of our equal worth in the eyes of God and a recognition of vast differences among us in intelligence and other qualities which affect social and cultural performances.

More problematically, the Urantia Book suggests that race is the first and primary determiner of a people’s collective potential for intellectual growth and spiritual development, and that the original races were not equally endowed by the Life Carriers with these culture-producing abilities. In the wake of the failure of our former world rulers to blend the races and upstep our capacities by widespread amalgamation with the superevolutionary violet race, we are left with a world population made up of various racial combinations, none of which represent the ideal blend originally planned for in the divine program.

Some people, according to the Urantia Book, contain more favorable blends than others, and the revelators attribute the cultural achievements of the recent and ancient past to societies containing a high proportion of individuals with these favorable blends. Since social and cultural progress partly depends on the hereditary endowments of a society’s people, the writers of the Urantia Book warn of the dangers of large-scale intermarriage between individuals of the more-favored and less-favored races, and decry the perpetuation of sociopaths and severely deficient individuals in all racial groups in each generation.

Yet, despite the failures of our former world rulers to fulfill their missions, and despite the fact that we are largely left to our own human devices to solve our biological, social, and cultural problems, the revelators are certain that the divine scheme of creation, evolution, and perfection will not fail on our planet. Says a Mighty Messenger:

And a Life Carrier states:

The Urantia Book's presentation of the divine scheme of finite creation, evolution, and perfection, with its detailed depictions of the persons, agencies and processes involved in carrying it out, phase by phase, on a myriad of inhabited worlds and architectural spheres, is probably the most fascinating, ingenious, illuminating and, at certain points, bewildering portrayal of theistic evolution ever written. It is safe to claim that no other book incorporates and interweaves such a rich and complex array of reconceptualized Biblical motifs, modern (i.e. early 20th century) biological themes and details, and stunningly original theological, angelological and cosmological constructs in its formulation of how God and his agents sponsor and foster the evolutionary process.

Indeed, the presentation of the spiritual and scientific dimensions of evolution in The Urantia Book is so rich and wide-ranging that it manages to combine what many people today believe to be two clashing and irreconcilable viewpoints: On the one hand the book repeatedly affirms with stirring eloquence the classic religious insight that God is no respecter of persons; on the other it repeatedly states with clinical detachment the typical racist and eugenicist observation that some racial groups are genetically less gifted, and therefore less socially desirable, than others. Several of the essays in this Wrightwood Series* grapple with this perceived clash, and more than one contributor, including myself, have stated that the book’s discussions of race must be seen in a larger context to be more fully appreciated. In this essay I have already outlined the first of the two contexts I wish to explore.

Unlike the first context, an understanding of which requires only a careful study of the Urantia Book, familiarity with the second requires a degree of exposure to a variety of thought trends—especially American and British—ranging from the theology and Bible scholarship of the mid and late 19th century, to the evolutionary biology and anthropology of the early 20th century, and the eugenics and race theories of both centuries. Books surveying the history of eugenics and race thinking, notably Mark Haller’s Eugenics: Hereditarian Attitudes in American Thought (1984) and Thomas F. Gossett’s Race: The History of an Idea in America (1963), provide information which would quickly awaken many Urantia Book readers to the fact that much of the book’s teachings on race and eugenics, and the language in which it is expressed, was not new, but reflected the contemporary views and voices of recognized authorities or exponents in these fields. The writers of the Urantia Book seem to have largely tailored their account of cosmic, human, and social evolution to fit the knowledge base and reference frames of educated and modern-minded Westerners of the early 20th century. Far from being ahead of its time, the Urantia Book’s portrayal of the evolutionary process would have been more immediately accessible and acceptable to such people than to us, since they were both more conversant with the Bible and more comfortable with the racial view of history and civilization put forward in the book. Though the Urantia Book would have been considered remarkable even then for its simultaneous inclusion of extensive discussions of egalitarian religion and inegalitarian evolutionary biology, neither the religion nor the biology was foreign to many modern-minded Westerners of the early 20th century, nor were they seen as incompatible.

More intensive research into the literature of the 19th and early 20th centuries reveals that the authors of the Urantia Book not only drew in a general way on contemporary human concepts but systematically culled passages from published books and placed their paraphrased revisions into various parts of the Papers. My findings indicate that of the 197 papers in the Urantia Book, at least half appear to have been composed using this paraphrasing technique to a greater or less degree. Certain papers in Part III contain up to ninety per cent paraphrased material deriving from two or three particular source books. The paraphrasing styles range from point-for-point correspondence with the original, to ingenious refiguring of a passage so that some of the original phraseology is retained but couched in a radically different context.

The fruits of my ongoing research will soon be shared in a series of books which treat various parts of the Urantia Book paper by paper, identifying the source books used, and exhibiting the parallel passages sentence by sentence in a two-column format. I then try to determine whether the remaining unparalleled sentences reveal previously unexpressed information (in which case it is coded as "original") or whether source parallels are yet to be found. Such determinations are, of course, provisional and apt to be overturned with new source-book discoveries. The discovery of the extent to which the writers of the Urantia Book drew upon previously published books has been a surprising, enlightening and disillusioning experience for me, as I expect it will be for others who, like me, have tended to ignore or misinterpret the revelators’ acknowledgments of indebtedness to over one thousand human concepts  and two thousand God-knowing men and women. The best result is that I have lost the distorted perspective that arose from confusing what is revealed with what is not. And I no longer look at the Urantia Book with mystified eyes as an unchallengeable or unimprovable oracle.

A microanalysis of every statement in the Urantia Book pertaining to the divine scheme of creation, evolution, and perfection would of course be impossible to do (in this essay or anywhere else), nor would it be particularly profitable since so much of the scheme appears to be original, and even its unoriginal aspects seem not to have drawn from specific source texts in a copious, sentence-by-sentence manner. A case in point is the book’s account of the six colored races, which lies at the heart of the race discussions: It is safe to say that neither the fact of their existence, their spectacular simultaneous emergence on our planet, nor their earliest dispersions has ever been posited outside of the Urantia Book.

Nonetheless, in the course of my research I have come upon a number of books containing material or concepts which the revelators appear to have adapted in expounding aspects of the divine scheme, including race and eugenics. The remainder of this essay is devoted to sharing a selection of my findings in areas involving the Urantia Book’s discussions of race, eugenics and related subjects. Hopefully it will contribute to a more informed understanding of the book’s teachings and reference points, and provoke further study and reflection.

Comment: The Urantia Book appears to be striking completely new ground in this account. I find no anticipation of this scenario in any evolutionist or non-evolutionist thinker. The terms "dawn mammals," "mid-mammals," and the specialized use of "Primates" to denote the immediate pre-human progenitor appear to have been created for this portrayal. The consistently humanward trend of these successive species, and the astonishingly short time it took to produce the first humans from their lemur-like forebears, suggests divine engineering. But the Life Carriers’ possible role in effecting this progression is not specified, nor is an attempt made to explain in scientific terms how these speciations came about. The Urantia Book maintains that "there is nothing supernatural connected with these genetic mutations" (669; 58:6.4); on the other hand, we are told that after the Life Carriers have implanted the initial life plasm, they are able to "manipulate the living units and maneuver the evolving organisms, even though they are shorn of all ability to organize—create—new patterns of living matter" (731; 65:1.4, italics added). Does "manipulating the living units" mean reconfiguring or reconstituting chromosomes?

Might affinities with the Urantia Book’s story be found in the folklore of non-Western peoples?

Anatomical description of the Andon and Fonta’s fully human features.

Description of the Andonites’ character traits.

Comment: The UB writer deftly collects all the elements of Osborn’s description and enlarges upon them. Notice that Osborn is describing the noble and humanlike traits of "all the higher members of the mammalian kingdom."

Initial dispersion of the Andonites.

Comment: Until recently, I thought the Urantia Book’s scenario of human/subhuman interbreeding had no precedent. All the evolutionists I have read postulate a generally progressive development from pre-humans to humans. The various hominid species discovered in the 19th and 20th centuries—the Java, Heidelberg and Neanderthal, etc.—are commonly understood to have arisen before the appearance of Homo sapiens. The Urantia Book, however, portrays these species as simianized devolutions from the original, "truly human" Andonite tribes. The Heidelbergs and Neanderthals are depicted as species struggling unsuccessfully to climb their way back up to the cultural and racial levels of the first Andonites.

The above passage from Ellen G. White comes close to anticipating The UB’s account, though stemming from a completely different frame of thought from that of evolutionary biology. White (1827-1915) was one of the founders of the theologically conservative Seventh-day Adventist Church and is recognized by most Seventh-day Adventists as a latter-day prophetess. She wrote voluminously on Biblical themes and Christian faith and ethics, and is probably the most widely translated female author in the world. Dr. Sadler was a devout member of the SDA church in his early years and was intimately familiar with White’s writings.

White’s account of the amalgamation of man and beast drew fire from non-SDA conservative Christians and caused confusion among SDA members. In her later writings about the causes of the Flood, White did not mention human/subhuman amalgamation.

Comment: The Neanderthals represent, for both Osborn and the Urantia Book, the last in a succession of pre-modern-looking humans. The UB’s account of the Java, Foxhall, Heidelberg and Neanderthal peoples is quite similar to Osborn’s in chronology and racial characterizations. Both date the emergence of the Heidelberg man at 900,000 B.C. and portray the Neanderthalers as being dominant in Europe for hundreds of thousands of years. One important difference between the two is that the Urantia Book does not mention the Piltdown man, whose existence Osborn enthusiastically champions.

One of the Urantia Book’s major theological accomplishments is its systematic reconceptualization of biblical motifs and persons. Familiar and not-so-familiar names and themes from the Bible are redefined and represented in the Papers. The name "Planetary Prince" refers to the Bible’s "prince of this world," and the UB tells us that our fallen Prince Caligastia — the devil — belonged to an order of local-universe personalities who are created and trained to rule on individual planets. On normal worlds a Planetary Prince serves loyally for many ages, directing planetary development. One of his many responsibilities is to devise the plan for the biological improvement of the mortal races and to oversee its execution by the Material Sons. The following UB passages describe this process of purification and upliftment through successive planetary ages.

From The Purposive Improvement of the Human Race (1930) by Princeton biologist Edwin G. Conklin:

Comment: The parallelisms between the UB passages and Conklin’s are remarkable. Conklin’s musings about a benevolent superhuman power in charge of selective reproduction are squarely met by the Urantia Book’s assertions that such superhuman beings do indeed exist and function on normal planets, and that their coordinated efforts do lead, after many thousands of years, to a "eugenic paradise" (a world settled in light and life) inhabited by "a magnificent race" of biologically upstepped mortals. The UB and Conklin further agree that, in the absence of such superhuman rulers on our planet, no "radical program" of eugenic purification can be undertaken. All that can be done is to agree democratically to prevent the reproduction of the most blatantly "defective" individuals.

The eugenics program hampered by the sentimentalism of the Church.

From Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race (1916):

And from Conklin:

Comment: The parallels in this and the preceding section are instructive in a number of ways. First, they indicate that the Urantia Book’s terms, such as "defective strains" and "degenerate stocks," were used widely in the eugenics discourse of early 20th century America and Britain. Grant and Conklin would have recognized nothing foreign in the Urantia Book’s eugenic terminology, assessments and recommendations. The authors of the Urantia Book meet these eugenicists on their own terms and on their level of scientific understanding as to the heritability of physical, mental and moral qualities.

Further, the passages from Grant and Conklin indicate how some eugenicists integrated the ethics of their science with Christianity. They made a distinction between sentimental and scientifically informed contributions to social welfare. But I have not found in the eugenics literature an extended discussion about how, or if, eugenicists were able to reconcile their stern perceptions of human inequalities with the spiritual consciousness of unity and brotherhood or, indeed, if they felt the need to.

Various histories and critiques of the eugenics movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries have been written; Mark Haller’s Eugenics (1984) provides an overview which readers of the UB would find helpful in understanding the Urantia Book’s reference frames. Dr. Sadler’s hard-to-find The Truth About Heredity (1927) includes a chapter called "Application of Genetics to Man" which reveals his enthusiastic support of the eugenics cause as well as his familiarity with the writings of Galton, Popenoe, Conklin and all the other major American and British eugenicists.

The Planetary Prince’s 300,000 years before the rebellion.

Comment: Curiously, no mention is made of any systematic attempt by the Planetary Prince to begin the race purification process during the 300,000 years of his reign before he rebelled. On the contrary, we are told that "the Prince’s staff were limited to natural means and ordinary methods of race improvement" until the arrival of Adam and Eve (646: 66.5.16). This limitation seems all the more problematic when we consider that before the rebellion, the blue races were intermingling with the debased Neanderthal stocks as they entered Europe, thereby neutralizing their superior primary Sangik potentials. If the role of the Planetary Prince is to purify the races before the arrival of the Material Sons, it seems contradictory that nothing was done to avert the massive Neanderthalization of the blue races. Especially since we are told that before the rebellion, the Prince’s regime—already more than halfway through the normal tenure of 500,000 years—was proceeding "most satisfactorily" (576; 50:4.6).

* * * 

As mentioned in the introduction, I believe that the Urantia Book’s thesis of six pre-designed racial types arising from prehuman species, either simultaneously or in succession, is radically new. It runs counter to a basic tenet of evolutionary biology, namely, that race is an incidental and environmentally determined variation of a species.

From biologist Ales Hrdlicka, on the origin of human races (1930):

Biologically speaking, the Urantia Book sets forth the paradox of six evolutionary races whose natures are not evolved but rather implanted with predesigned configurations of physical, intellectual and spiritual traits. The following set of parallels illustrates the contrasting perspectives of the Urantia Book and an evolutionist on the question of how characteristics are derived:

Curiously, although the Urantia Book maintains that "very definite social tendencies characterize the offspring of these different basic types of human beings," its descriptions of these tendencies are extremely vague, in the rare cases in which they are made. The book’s lack of specificity as to the precise nature of the qualitative and genetic differences between the six races is offset by its clear-cut and consistent description of the red, yellow and blue races as superior and the orange, green and indigo races as inferior in culture-producing potentials. Compare the following passages with the first definitions of "racism" cited below.

From Webster’s Third International Dictionary:

From The American Heritage Dictionary:

Since the Urantia Book’s thesis of six colored races arising simultaneously in northwest India is probably original, I have not been able to trace much source material for the early dispersions of and interactions between these six races and the pre-existent Andonites. Here is an example of one of the few parallel passages I have found. Notice again the difference in perspective between the Urantia Book’s racial determinism and Osborn’s adaptive evolutionism:

From Osborn:

Throughout its history of the races, the Urantia Book articulates the overall theme of civilizational potentials rising and falling in accordance with a society’s varying racial compositions. The following passage from Paper 79 exemplifies this theme.

Readers who are interested in learning more about this way of conceiving history are advised to read Thomas F. Gossett’s Race: The History of an Idea in America.

The full story of the Nodites is undoubtedly original with the Urantia Book, but the following series of parallels show that ingredients of the story were anticipated by and/or derived from widely disparate lines of thought, ranging from the writings of 19th century Bible interpreters to a 20th century biologist.

Comment: Notice the use of the term "inheritance factors" in the two passages.

The land of Nod and the existence of pre-Adamite civilization.

From Winchell’s Preadamites (1890):

Comment: Winchell’s thesis is that Adam and Eve were the first Caucasians and that the Bible is the record of the Caucasian race alone. He and M’Causland were among a number of 19th century thinkers who felt that the disparities between the races were so vast that they could not have developed since the beginning of creation, which was commonly believed to have occurred in 4004 B.C. Winchell surmised that non-Caucasian peoples were already on earth by this date, and found confirmation for this notion in the Bible’s reference to the land of Nod. Winchell assumes that these people of Nod were the various Mongoloid and Negroid races, along with Dravidians, who he conjectures to have been the immediate progenitors of the vastly superior Adamites. In much the same way as The Urantia Book describes the emergence of the mutant Sangik races, Winchell (without using the word mutation) says, "It is not unscientific to admit that he [Adam] may have represented a decided and even a sudden step in organic improvement. . . . Adam was a noble and superior specimen appearing in the midst of these Asiatic preadamites" (191,193). He does not surmise the existence of a separate race called the Nodites. Interestingly, The Urantia Book tells us that the "land of Nod"-Elam-had become "largely Sangik in nature" by the time Cain arrived there.

The Tower of Babel and the dispersion of the Nodites.

From Ellen White’s Patriarchs and Prophets (1890):

Comment: Ellen White’s enlargement of the Tower of Babel story contains interpolations that are remarkably similar to those in the Urantia Book’s version. The account in Genesis mentions nothing about a division of opinion among the men of Babel, nor about the Babel builders’ determination to stick together. I have also found unique similarities in her and the UB’s versions of the Lucifer rebellion and of the Adam and Eve story. These similarities are all the more intriguing since her adherence to biblical literalism contrasts so sharply with the UB’s more iconoclastic approach. Dr. Sadler, his wife Lena, Wilfred Kellogg and his wife Anna—all former Seventh-day Adventists—must certainly have been aware of these correspondences.

From Peake and Fleure’s Peasants and Potters (1927):

Comment: It would be interesting to learn what the various opinions are among today’s Sumerologists regarding the origin of the earliest Sumerians.

Again from Peake and Fleure:

Comment: Recall that the "Adamites and Nodites were long-headed; the Andonites were broad-headed" (UB: 904; 81:4.2).

VI. ADAM AND EVE AND THE VIOLET RACE

I have been unable to find any clear anticipation in previous literature of the Urantia Book’s "superhumanizing" of Adam and Eve, apart from the ambiguous statement in the Bible regarding the sons of God mating with the daughters of men. (Interestingly, the Urantia Book variously interprets "the sons of God" to refer to the Adamites and the Nodites. See 856; 77:2.3 for the latter application.) In some types of mystical literature, Adam is metaphorized to represent a cosmic principle; but nowhere have I come across similar portrayals of Adam and Eve as members of a superhuman order whose purpose is to serve as biological uplifters of the evolutionary races. The Urantia Book’s account of the planetary missions of the Material Sons and its explanation of the facts surrounding the "fall" (default) of Adam and Eve on our world, appear to be completely original with the Papers.

Distinct parallelisms come into focus, however, when comparing the Urantia Book’s depiction of the violet race with certain 19th century conceptions of the Caucasian race. We recall that even on worlds where the Material Son and Daughter have not defaulted, their pureline progeny are mortal. After several generations, when these Adamic offspring number more than one million, they begin to venture out to the surrounding peoples to act as cultural and biological uplifters, living and dying among these various races.

The concept of a new and superior race arising in the midst of less gifted races, was put forward by both Dominick M’Causland and Alexander Winchell in connection with their attempts to harmonize "scripture and ethnology" and assert the superiority of the white race. The following passages illustrate phases of correspondence and divergence between Winchell’s and M’Causland’s conception of the Caucasian race and the Urantia Book’s presentation of the violet race and its progressively diluted embodiments in the Andite and modern-day white races.

From Randolph S. Foster’s Studies in Theology (1895), on M’Causland’s theory of Adam:

From M’Causland’s Adam and the Adamite (1864):

Comment: Notice that the violet race did not have violet complexions. They were not, in the Urantia Book's parlance, a "colored" race.

From M’Causland’s chapter on "The Adamite Dispersions":

The Adamsonites, like the Nodites and Adamites, are a previously unknown race whose name is linked to the Urantia Book’s reconstruction of the Adam and Eve story in Genesis, and whose early and superior cultural performances are accounted for by their superevolutionary bloodlines. As the following set of parallels shows, the revelators’ account of the Adamsonites’ existence and history is framed by Peake and Fleure’s description of a recently found and little explored site of very early culture in Central Asia. The UB authors similarly appropriate and build upon Peake and Fleure’s descriptions of other prehistoric cultures, identifying their producers as either Nodite, violet, or Andite and thereby accounting for the ancientness of these cultures. However, the Urantia Book repeatedly pushes back Peake and Fleure’s chronology by thousands of years. Peake and Fleure’s geological and cultural timescale is generally far more conservative than the one used by Henry Fairfield Osborn in Man Rises to Parnassus. When faced with a choice, the revelators use Osborn’s dating scheme, though even his chronological estimates are often bypassed in favor of much earlier dates.