Review: Birth of a Divine Revelation by Ernest Moyer

When I learned of Ernest’s publication I ordered it direct from author and promised him a review. I’ve known Ernest, not personally, but through the medium of correspondence, for ten or more years. I know he is a good investigative reporter, an eloquent writer, and harbors certain pet theories about the future of our world, and the processes that will lead it there. Make no mistake, this book is pure Ernest. He leaves little to the imagination!

Ernest subtitles his book “The Origin of the Urantia Papers”, and indeed this is the core of his subject matter. While others have told this history in simple narrative form, Ernest takes a more indirect approach preferring to let the history tell itself though his making of several strategic points. concerning the parties involved, and the events surrounding them.

Ernest declares several purposes for his substantial effort. These include:

1. A refutation of Martin Gardner’s URANTIA, THE GREAT CULT MYSTERY (Prometheus books 1995)

2. Establishment of William Sadler as the real “contact personality” (though Ernest is quick to point out this does not mean he was the “sleeping subject”), and a refutation of the Wilfred Kellogg as sleeping subject theory.

3. Expose the corruptions to the text of the Urantia Papers added between 1939 and 1942, both in content and source.

Along the way, Ernest reflects on a litany of structural problems in the Urantia movement in general, and the Urantia Foundation in particular, briefly tracing their consequences to the more recent history, and present day conflicts within the Urantia Movement. He traces the origin of some of these problems to the human fallibilities of those who formed the closest advisory circle around William Sadler as well as W.S. himself who, after the death of his wife Lena in 1939, and the ending of contact with the sleeping subject, may have lapsed in certain critical facilities.

Does Ernest prove his case? I don’t have any problem with his over all refutation of Martin Gardner. Ernest and I both believe in the divinity of the source of the revelation as a whole. Gardner certainly ignored or perverted a lot of evidence to arrive at his hatchet job. I don’t think that any of us who are believers in the UB are going to fault Ernest for his observations in this direction. His disproof of the Wilfred Kellogg as sleeping-subject theory is a part of his refutation of Gardner, and he is pretty convincing here as well. Ernest does relate his tale of his trying to uncover the real identity of the sleeping subject, and his failure to do so, but in conducting this investigation, several things, not the least of which were records of where the two men (W.K. and W.S.) lived during the period of sleeping subject activity, should lay to rest the notion that W.K. was the sleeping subject.

I think Ernest achieves his second purpose as well. Here he asks the question: If you had to pick the kind of man in whom you would entrust the initial launching of a new revelation, what kind of character would you want? Ernest amasses a considerable collection of testimony, documentary (letters, reviews) and anecdotal, demonstrating the unusual combination of factors that made up the character of William Sadler Sr. He was, indeed an unusual individual, Jesusonian in his devotion to God via service to mankind. He even shared some of Jesus’ more personal characteristics such as his abilities as a public speaker and storyteller, the ability “to hold an audience with his words.” Sadler also had considerable energy, and an ability to function at all hours, under pressure, sometimes with little sleep.

It does seem that Sadler was an extraordinary person in his youth and middle age. Ernest points out that events surrounding W.S. in relation to the Seventh Day Adventist Church, and the personal decisions that followed from those experiences, uniquely prepared him for his role as first shepherd of the revelation. Ernest’s case here is a good one. I could almost feel the angelic hands that guided W.S. to his first encounter with the sleeping subject.

Ernest’s contention is, that while W.S. is not the sleeping subject, he is the real person we should be calling the primary “contact personality.” The sleeping subject, was merely a means of engaging W.S. in the revelatory process without producing too-overt (perhaps more easily traceable), a conversion point from the celestial to the material. W.S. was the real engine behind the process of give-and-take with the revelators which culminated with the appearance of the papers in 1934 and 1935. All the basic Urantia movement mysteries, the real purpose of all the preliminary documents handled through the contact commission (those few who directly observed the behavior of the sleeping subject) and forum (the 400+ people who reviewed the preliminary and then later finished papers), where and when exactly the final papers appeared, etc., remain in place. I can’t fault Ernest for this, he tried. I sympathize with his desire to clarify the facts though. Personally, I wish he had found some of the details he sought.

Ernest nicely distinguishes between human engagement in the preliminary first phase of contact, and human contribution to the final outcome in the finished revelation delivered in the mid 1930’s, but he fails to discover the why of it all which is also too bad in my opinion, though one can not fault him for that failure either. Indeed one is tempted to ask why all the fuss? Surely some more direct means of engaging W.S. could have been found. One can only suggest, and Ernest leads us to speculate, that the revelators were enjoined to reduce or restrict the direct appearance of divine intervention in human affairs to the maximum possible degree. The decades long involvement of human beings in exchange with divinely produced material through the mouth, pen, and possibly other means involving a mechanically manipulated sleeping subject established a long human interaction with the process that masked the direct points at which the divine was responsible for the appearance of revelatory text. Who is to say here that Ernest isn’t correct? Indeed it appears to be a style that is characteristic of the Urantia Revelation, presented in such a way that one can at least try to make a case for a human origin.

ERNEST’S MAIN PURPOSE

Ernest’s third purpose is far more problematic. It is a complex set of arguments involving many factors, and ultimately influencing not only thought and criticism of the Urantia Book, but also the structure of the present day Urantia movement. Ernest’s tenets along these lines can be summed up as follows:

1. Something happened after the last of the papers was delivered in 1935. Dr. Sadler mentions a “third series” of revelation, the first referring to all the preliminary work of the forum with the revelators, the second being the delivery of the final papers themselves in 1934-35, and the third, being some clarifications that appear to have entered the text between 1939 and 1942.

2. Christy, Emma Christensen, was the focus of the reception of these clarifications. In addition to serving in this capacity, Christy has other very important influences on the character and direction of both the Urantia Foundation, and early prominent leaders in the Urantia movement.

3. Caligastia is, ultimately, the source of the various corruptions in the text itself, and other apochryphal material found in the politically influential literature of the Urantia movement.

Ernest then spends considerable time discussing the most serious of the corruptions, really contradictions of one kind or another, in the text. His analysis, he concludes, leads one to see an intelligent hand, a deliberate perversion in the nature of the contradictions. He is quite detailed about what he takes to be the content and implications of the particular contradictions he examines. Alas, I find in much of this section a failure on Ernest’s part to consider alternative, and actually much simpler explanations that, in many cases, eliminate the contradiction altogether. In short, much of the worst of the textual corruptions that Ernest thinks he (and others) have discovered, are not contradictions at all, but skewed interpretations of the UB text itself. Perfectly plausible alternative explanations exist that are contradiction free. I’ll discuss these in detail below.

As with the other sections of the book, Ernest does his best in this first part of his argument for the devil’s hand! He amasses some considerable evidence that some changes in the text took place in the 1939-1942 period, that Christy was the human source of the new material, and that the misguided efforts of Harold Sherman who desired to incorporate his own changes, probably shocked W.S. into stopping any further changes in 1942. Why, if Sadler realized that making changes was wrong, he could not simply undo them all (the book hadn’t been printed yet) I’m not sure. Beyond 1942, Ernest offers three corroborating testimonies that messages continued to be revealed (by Christy) certainly through the 1960’s, and likely well beyond that time, almost to Christy’s death in 1982. He also provides something of a psychological background for the emergence of this phenomena. Sadler’s beloved wife Lena passed away in 1939 leaving him extremely lonely. By this time, the activity of the sleeping subject had ceased, leaving him without his connection to divine advice of several decades. W.S. had, at this point, whole heartedly accepted the reality of divine contact, and thus was the stage set for his acceptance (and lack of critical examination) when his own adopted daughter (a strange story right there), Christy, began to claim contact with spiritual beings who wished to deliver further clarifications to the revelation!

Christy and the changes are inextricably connected. Christy began to channel in the traditional sense. Ernest claims repeatedly that it was Caligastia she was channeling, but he also notes that she was a bad channeler; that her own mind got in the way of the message and distorted its final expression (406). Personally, it seems plausible to me that all of what Christy said or wrote in these years emanated from her own mind. It is easy to see a combination of midwestern conservatism mingled with a sense of recent history (WWII began in Sept. of 1939) in the documents adduced by Ernest to be the distorted sayings of Caligastia.

Still, there are mysteries afoot, of that no one should doubt. There is a document, written by Carolyn Kendall and reproduced by Ernest (chapt 26), which refers to “verbal” instructions during and after 1939. Ernest claims on page 372 that W.S. (and possibly others alluded to by Carolyn’s document) heard ‘”voices” coming out of the thin air’, but I can not find this claim anywhere in Carolyn’s document, only that the witnesses (contact commission) heard a voice, which may or may not have emanated from Christy. Ernest insists that “The creation of visible images and audible speech is prevalent in the ‘spiritualist’ community.” Ernest directs the reader to his own paper on the subject “Spirit Entry Into the Human Mind” which I have not read, but I do, for now, reject this idea on principle, especially as concerns visual effects. Such things require the cooperation of physical controllers who would not have been cooperating with Caligastia in the 20th century.

Ernest is not talking about fraud. The material Ernest offers as evidence does not compel us (in my opinion) to believe that rebel spirits were the only possible source. Some of what Ernest claims is “pure Devil talk,” the well known “word made book” phrase, for example (374), seems patently human to me. Truly, as Ernest has surmised, such sloganism does not strike one as being from the “true source”, but Carolyn never says that she was quoting the revelators [the channeling Christy], only relaying the substance of the messages. For all we know Clyde Bedell suggested this particular phrase. Human or celestial, the channeling is what lent Christy her authority in the movement. That authority set the stage for Christy’s two other big influences, the selection of Martin Myers for the Foundation, and the discovery of and subsequent influence on Vern Grimsley.

While Ernest doesn’t prove his case that “the Devil made ’em do it” to my satisfaction, his considerable effort in these parts of the his book (Chapters 24-27) does build a strong case that the very structure of the Urantia movement, especially the Foundation, along with all the problems engendered by that structure since the publication, not to mention the unraveling (as Ernest himself puts it) of what ever unity the movement had going into the mid 1980’s following Christy’s death, can be very much traced to these critical years (1939-1954). If nothing else, Ernest’s collection, into an organized volume, of the various apochryphal documents of the Urantia movement is a contribution to the movement’s understanding of itself. Though his viewpoint on movement politics differs from my own, no one would bother to deny that there have been some serious miscalculations and lack of wisdom exhibited in the actions of the leadership in both the Urantia movement and the Foundation in the now 45 years, almost two generations, since the Book’s first printing. Who is to say that this “third series” of revelatory changes, and the other messages that followed them prior to the Book’s first printing did not have some, and may even have been “the” major causative influence on who we are today.

THE CORRUPTIONS THEMSELVES

Three broad kinds of corruptions exist. Typographical errors, errors in scientific fact and known history, and internal contradictions between sentences or paragraphs in one part of the book and another. These last have to do with dates and other contradictions in content.

No one is worried about the typographical errors, most of which were corrected between the first and second printing. These were the obvious ones, but there are a more subtle sort that appear to be more substantive, for example the transformation of “external” into “eternal” (102:8:4 first sentence), is a seemingly obvious typo given the sentence’s context, that has never been corrected in UF sponsored printings of the book.

Some of the “scientific errors” do indeed exist. Some of the more interesting of those have not even been mentioned (the second clause “…if for no other reason…” of the sentence beginning “Ever will the scientist…” in the first paragraph of paper 65 section 6 is not true for modern biological sciences, yet the sentence suggests it will always be true), while other more famous examples have proven on further analysis to be nothing of the sort, like the “gravitational friction” statement in 57:6:2 which cleverly left room open for the fact that Mercury was discovered (in the 60’s I believe) to be still rotating, even relative to is revolutionary period!

Ernest here poses a legitimate question. If the book was delivered paper by complete paper in 1934 and 1935 why would there be any obviously erroneous scientific statements as seen from the viewpoint of but a few decades later? Why would there be any error in the book that couldn’t be attributed to imperfect transcription to type, and from type to plate, or that didn’t become, on second glance, a clever device by the revelators to anticipate future science? His answer is that any error small or large casts doubt upon the veracity of the work as a whole, and this indeed is what Caligastia found himself limited to doing in his effort to corrupt the revelation. In correspondence with me, Ernest was quick to point out that he did not here intend to refer to believers, but to those who find reason to reject the Book’s revelatory claims based on what amount to errors too simple for genuine revelators to make. That these errors have, on occasion, had this effect, one can not deny.

Yet even if errors did creep in thanks to Dr. Sadler’s uncritical acceptance of Christy’s channeled material, the ultimate source may lie elsewhere than the personal doings of Caligastia, namely Christy’s fertile subconscious. To prove Ernest wrong about the timing of the changes, that is to demonstrate that the errors were present in the original text, one would have to have access to the original papers of the second series as they appeared in the possession of W.S., and were delivered to the forum. Of course, these have been destroyed, and one finds oneself wishing, again, that that was not the case so that we might now clear up some of these mysteries. Ernest claims that some of what Sadler changed (corrected) between the first and second printings suggest some, but not by any means all of what was changed in the “third series” of presentations. While we can not be sure of any of this, no one has suggested any alternative to Ernest’s contentions in this regard, other than that Caligastia was not responsible for them!

One notes however, that until Ernest’s last couple of chapters, the corruptions discussed are all pretty trivial. A word here, a phrase there a, syllogism on page 3 involving three levels of perfection (who could have guessed that they yielded 7 possible relationships?) that appeared in print 6 years after 1935 (why people can’t believe the author was influenced by something someone said who knew someone, who knew a member of the then 300+ person forum is beyond me), some of which do constitute interesting mysteries of the Urantia movement. When, however, Ernest attempts to analyze what he claims to be more serious contradictions he fares not so well in the opinion of this reviewer.

THE MORE SERIOUS CORRUPTIONS

First up is the 40 day problem! Ernest devotes parts of two chapters to this one. It comes down to this. At the opening of paper 194, the apostles are in prayer with 120 believers when at about 1:00 pm there comes into their midst the Spirit of Truth. This is May 18, Jesus made his final appearance to the apostles that morning at 7:00 am and ascended to his Father. If you start with the date of the crucifixion which was on the day of passover (passover beginning at sundown of that day), 42 days have passed counting the crucifixion day as 1. Now section 1 of paper 194 begins as follows: “The apostles had been in hiding for 40 days. This happened to be the Jewish festival of Pentecost,…” (194:1:1).

The trouble arises because the word “this” beginning the second sentence is assumed to be referring not only to “this day”, the day of Pentecost, but also to “this day of the arrival of the spirit of truth”, and that “40 days” is taken to mean “40 continuous days.” The two events (the day of the ascension and Pentecost) are easily conjoined in the mind of the reader, and the midwayer’s literary transition from the introductory section to section 1 of paper 194 certainly contributes to the confusion, but this is not actually what the first two sentences of section 1 say. The Spirit of Truth arrived on day 42 following the crucifixion, Pentecost begins on day 50 (a week of weeks if you begin counting the day after the crucifixion), and the apostles have been hiding for 40 [of the last 50] days! This great problem (which apparently bothered W.S. himself) is resolved if you do not assume that the word “this” refers to the same day of the arrival of the Spirit of Truth, and that the “in hiding for 40 days” means no more than what it says, that is, that they were not in hiding for 8 (42 + 8 = 50) of the last 50 days as indeed they were not (they were in Galilee with Jesus, on mount Olivet, etc.).

Ernest’s investigation of this problem leads him to discover one of the more significant date issues. In 191:3:3, the statement is made that Jesus entered the “embrace of the Most Highs of Edentia” on May 14, yet he ascended (by way of Edentia and the Most Highs) on May 18 (193:5:4). Ernest thinks he has discovered a date error here, a corruption, but there are two other and much simpler possibilities. One is that the statement on 193:5:4 refers to a different event. Might it not have been possible for Jesus to have visited with the Most Highs more than once during his morontia transit? Another possibility is simply another typographical error, that the date given in 191:3:3 should have been May 18, not the 14th!

Others of his suggested targets of corruption can be explained equally easily. For example, another of Ernest’s contradictions has to do with the following two sentences…

“Gabriel and the Father Melchizedek are never away from Salvington at the same time, for in Gabriel’s absence, the Father Melchizedek functions as the chief executive of Nebadon” (35:1:2)

“These three conversed in a strange language but from certain things said, Peter erroneously conjectured that the beings with Jesus were Moses and Elijah; in reality, they were Gabriel and the Father Melchizedek” (158:1:8)

Indeed how could Gabriel and the Father Melchizedek both visit with Jesus on Earth if one or the over must always be present on Salvington? The answer is simple. The “never” in the first sentence is not a categorical imperative, but a declaration of convention and normal behavior. The terminal bestowal of a Creator Son happens but once in every local universe, enough of a rarity that Gabriel and the Father Melchizedek might make an exception to normal practice and be both briefly away from Salvington.

Ernest cites other examples, but in every case, they can be easily enough explained away (as above), or attributed to misinterpretation. For example, the UB cites many examples of contact between celestial beings and humans that did not appear to require midwayer mediation, and are therefore in conflict with the following: “Contact personalities. In the contacts made with the mortal beings of the material worlds, such as with the subject through whom these communications were transmitted, the midway creatures are always employed. They are an essential factor in such liaisons of the spiritual and the material levels.” (77:8:8)

It is clear from the context of the quote that the book is speaking of a certain limited class of contacts, a certain kind of contact, and not of contacts in general, many of which may be directly engaged in by higher celestial beings.

THE GOVERNMENT PROBLEM

In one of what Ernest believes is among the most serious corruptions, his examination of the Urantia Book’s discussion of the evolution of government and society, he exhibits the least understanding of what the UB is trying to say.

The UB extols the virtues of representative government (45:7:3, 52:4, 70:12:1, 71:2, 74:5:7, 134:5-6), for example:

“The entire universe is organized and administered on the representative plan. Representative government is the divine ideal of self-government among nonperfect beings.” (45:7:3). The second sentence sets the context for the word “universe” in the first sentence. The revelators are referring to the seven super-universes (the outer space levels not being populated yet) in the present era, prior to the completion of the Supreme. What constitutes “ideal” government in the central universe and/or paradise we are not directly told.

Ernest derives two problems from the UB’s favoring of representative government in the universes of time. The first stems from this seemingly contradictory statement:

“While there is a divine and ideal form of government, such can not be revealed, but must be slowly and laboriously discovered by the men and women of each planet throughout the universes of time and space” (70:12:9)

What is it that can not be revealed, especially to the laboring men and women for whom the revelation is intended, that the revelators have not already told us with their exultation of representative government? As far as governments go, the UB tells us that on a developed world nearing light-and-life, and especially *in* light and life, the social structure can, in some phases, reflect not the administrative needs of a vast set of universes, but the perfection of Havona! This is possible, because the people of these worlds, like ourselves, are all indwelt by the Father directly! The lowest level becomes a reflection of the highest! This is a pattern in the theology of the UB, and Ernest completely misses this implication.

Ironically, the very paragraphs in the UB that make this case for perfection are Ernest’s next candidates for corruption. In 52:7:5, the book is talking about a planet well along the path to political settledness, even a spiritual manifestation of the brotherhood of man. The Book goes on to say: “Representative government is vanishing, and the world is passing under the rule of individual self-control.” In 55:5:4 we find the following: “Government is gradually disappearing. Self-control is slowly rendering laws of human enactment obsolete.”

Ernest says “The only condition under which representative government would vanish is that of the existence of perfect beings. Will our world eventually achieve perfect mortals?” (461)

Ernest first fails to note that government is “vanishing”, it hasn’t vanished. Even if it did vanish in light and life eras, that would not contradict the UB’s statement concerning the rest of the universe because the answer to Ernest’s question is yes! Provisionally and for the limited sphere of life we call politics on an evolutionary planet, human culture, and individuals will eventually become perfect enough to rise above the need for formal government! Ernest misses a key clue to this reality on 70:8:1 “The mental and physical inequality of human beings insures that social classes will appear. The only worlds without social strata are the most primitive and the most advanced. A dawning civilization has not yet begun the differentiation of social levels, while a world SETTLED IN LIGHT AND LIFE has largely effaced these divisions of mankind, which are so characteristic of ALL INTERMEDIATE STAGES.” Emphasis mine.

Having missed this simpler interpretation of this material, and in so doing also missing one of the most important revelations concerning our social future, Ernest declares: “This is the theme of the Caligastia betrayal: ‘individual liberty consequent upon enhanced self-control.'” (460) Ernest does not perceive the reality of the vast gulf between the Caligastia declaration of self-determination in primitive peoples, and the perfection of self-control gained over countless centuries of following the Father’s will! He forgets that “Most of the liberties which Lucifer sought he already had; others he was to receive in the future. All these precious endowments were lost by giving way to IMPATIENCE and yielding to a desire TO POSSESS WHAT ONE CRAVES NOW and to possess it in defiance of all obligation to respect the rights and liberties of all other beings composing the universe of universes.”(54:4:4 emphasis mine)

Ernest can’t fail to see that the paragraphs describing the rebel teachings (see 53:3:6, 53:4:2 53:7:2) use the words ‘self-assertion’, ‘self-determination’, and ‘unbridled liberty’. Ernest actually makes the claim that the substitution of ‘self-control’ in section 52:7:5 and 55:5:4 for ‘self-assertion’ in 53:4:2 is nothing more than a Caligastic sleight of hand to delude us into believing that such political achievement is possible. Why, given the contextual emphasis on the far future, this should be a problem anyway is beyond me, but the bottom line is that Ernest ignores or forgets the UB principle that TIME matters. Immature self-assertion is TRANSFORMED into advanced self-control over TIME, and that there are eons of difference between them! They are not the same!

In addition, we see that the very sentence that Ernest offers as evidence of corruption (“…such can not be revealed…”) is in fact another hint at the end point of the planetary political process, a state that is beyond representative government; beyond, because the individuals living on such worlds (and their Father fragments) have, within their planetary frame, collectively superceded it.

Ernest says that “Caligastia’s method in perverting the Revelation was to alter words, phrases, or sentences and insert them into paragraphs where they could easily slip by without notice.” (462). Although I have not here examined every example that Ernest suggests to us, I have, in reading through them, discovered that most can be attributed to the application of a singular viewpoint causing various paragraphs to be interpreted together in a way that makes them appear insidiously contradictory when in reality, and in their normal context, there are alternative interpretations and viewpoints for which no, or only trivial contradictions exist. That there are mysteries that sometimes appear to be unexplainable contradictions in the UB I do not doubt, but none of those that Ernest classifies as the most serious, those pertaining to the social evolution of the planet and the timing of events in Jesus’ life are, in my opinion, contradictions at all!

To sum up, Ernest has set himself a number of tasks in his book, some of which he handles convincingly, while others he doesn’t. Along the way, he leaves us with an interesting collection of Urantia memorabilia, and a well told tale of investigative endeavor. His refutation of Gardner carries through the work well, as do his theories concerning the real role of William Sadler Sr. While I think Ernest’s contentions concerning a Caligastic hand in UB affairs are a bit of a stretch, in trying to make that case, he does at least show us that our own history was fraught with error and human (at least) self assertion.

Matthew Rapaport, June 2000

Gardner, Moyer, and Mullins: Three Histories of The Urantia Book

This review, first published on the Urantia Brotherhood website ( I cannot find it there any longer) in 2001. It deserves to be here since I am writing lately about the book explicitly. As usual, I unclude links to the books reviewed. Excellent E-copies of The Urantia Book itself are found here for only $4

At the opening of the 21^st century we find ourselves with 3 large histories of the Urantia Papers. First published,Urantia: The Great Cult Mystery by Martin Gardner in 1995, followed by Ernest Moyer’s THE BIRTH OF A DIVINE REVELATION: The Origin of the Urantia Papers, and then A History of the Urantia Papers by Larry Mullins, both published in 2000. For a more detailed review of the Moyer book (with extensive philosophical and theological commentary) see this link.

From a believer’s perspective, Larry Mullins’ story of the revelation is the most orthodox with all the phases through which the papers traveled overseen – however infrequently – by divine authority until the actual year of first printing in 1955. While this is, essentially, the down the middle story, it is full of interesting suprises and well clarifies some of the conflicting aspects of even the official histories as they’ve been recorded since the first printing. It is also the most severely critical of the present status quo in the Urantia Movement.

Martin Gardner’s book, while often funny – and you better have a sense of humor about yourself because he’s poking fun at us – is so interlaced with misinterpretations, out of context statements, even outright lies and slander “Below I AM are billions of lesser gods” Gardner declares on p19, that his insightful observations may be too easily dismissed by UB readers. Gardner paints a picture of utterly human invention, deceit, and betrayal that explains the existence of the UB. He selects out-of-context events of UB history, especially those surrounding Harold Sherman and Harry Loose, that best suit his purpose, and then weaves a story around these isolated facts.

In between this telling, he does manage to make some interesting observations however, and it is a shame that the insights are mixed in with so much that is misrepresentative. Gardner’s only concession to the divinity of the revelatory process is the acknowledgement that there was a sleeping subject, and that this person (he thinks its Wilfred Kellog) made statements and/or wrote things whose content is part of that which makes up the UB. He does not share any opinion on whether this material really had a celestial origin, or was merely the product of the sleeping subject’s mind. For Gardner, the UB comes down to some unexpected (and unexplained) channeling on the part of Wilfred Kellog coupled with a conspiracy, on the part of Dr. Sadler, to inject into the spiritual ferment and literary stream of his time, a fantastic fraud. The saddest irony of Gardner’s book is that if he had employed the services of a UB reader merely to delete the out rightly false statements concerning the UB’s contents (I know he had offers), what would remain would still be pretty damning.

Ernest Moyer, like Larry, believes that at core, the UB is divinely authored. Moyer however looks at the unfolding events of the late thirties and early forties and forces us to ask the question: What is the deposed Planetary Prince (whom we all suppose for the sake of argument is still on the planet) doing about the UB? We all take for granted that he (Caligastia) would desire to obstruct or otherwise thwart the fundamental purposes of the UB. We differ in our estimation of just how much potency he has in this regard, with Moyer casting his history in the light of his presupposition of Caligastia’s ability to enter into and dialog with any human mind who sits back and says “come hither spirit and talk to me.” Ironically, for his version of things, Caligastia’s worst couldn’t have been more damaging than what the movement, particularly the Urantia Foundation, has done to itself! If old Cal was involved, it wasn’t the text that appears to have been his target, as much as the movement.

Larry Mullins manages to deal well with both Gardner and Moyer, but only if you accept some of his central propositions to be fundamentally factual. Mullins claims that no communication with celestials ever took place without the presence of the sleeping subject and at least two of the human contact commissioners. If his claims are correct, then it would have been impossible for either Christy or Dr. Sadler to have believed that the celestial revelatory commission could be reached by channeling, let alone that Dr. Sadler would have taken channeled messages as the product of celestial intelligences. Mullins addresses other of Moyer’s evidence as well, pointing out for example that the Book’s 1934, 35 “indictment” statements mean only that the sections were begun in those years, not that they were a finished product.

Most people in the Urantia movement take for granted that a small amount of human error began to filter into the revealed material as soon as the original handwritten papers were typed. Further minor errors were introduced during the typesetting process, unnoticed by the proofreaders. The original set of nickle-plated stereotypes thus contained errors, which appeared in the first printing of the Urantia Book. Everything that went before the plates – the handwritten pages, the typed manuscripts, etc. – was destroyed. At that point, the plates became the canonical Urantia Book.

Imperfections were supposed to distance the Urantia Book from anything that might appear supernatural or unduly extraordinary. They were, I’d supposed, mostly typographical in nature, with a few typos making some semantic difference. I had also learned that alterations were made to the text between the various printings and that some of them went beyond the correction of obvious typos. This was not of great concern to those of us who noticed these things as the number of these semantic modifications was very small (fifteen, according to Mullins), and could easily be analyzed and evaluated by an enlightened readership. Mullins observes, however, that dispite revelator involvement through 1955, they apparently never mention these imperfections. This fact fits nicely with Gardner’s version of events.

Gardner attacks UB content on scientific grounds, on its uncanny similarities to some Seventh Day Adventist doctrine (in which W. S. Sr. was heavily involved in his earlier days), and upon it’s over all theological silliness. His theological criticisms are unfounded. He misunderstands the theology of the UB, and likely got much of it second hand. He notes for example that the UB’s concept of God The Supreme is reflected in the early 20^th century theology of Teilhard de Chardin, but utterly misses the fact that Teilhard thinks he’s discovered the whole of God while the UB places the Supreme in a context much wider than anything Teilhard imagined.

The parallelisms Gardner identifies between the doctrines of Seventh-day Adventism (as expressed in the writings of Ellen G. White, one of the sect’s founders) and some of the teachings of the Urantia Book, are intriguing. Also interesting are the connections he draws between the UB’s teachings and some of Dr. Sadler’s philosophic beliefs and scientific views, as expressed in Sadler’s early books. Gardner suggests that Sadler must have felt betrayed when he discovered, in about 1906, that the supposedly prophetic revelations of Ellen White were often little more than plagiarisms of other human writers. Stung by this sense of betrayal, Sadler decided to create a new religion, adopting not only material from Seventh-day Adventism but White’s plagiaristic methods as well.

In this case, Gardner’s criticism finds a ready answer in the canon of UB thought. Revelation is not entirely new, but expresses itself largely from what exists. The Seventh Day Adventist connection could, after all, be one of the reasons W. Sadler Sr. was chosen by celestials for the task! Gardner notes however, the number of coincidental agreements with Dr. Sadler’s other writing is very large on subjects as diverse as eugenics and humor. Gardner wants us to conclude that the UB was largely written by Sadler. Gardner, however, is at a loss to explain how the language of the UB, while reflecting Sadler’s own work, also makes distinctions and qualifications that Sadler’s thought lacks. Gardner does not notice that revelation is not utterly new. It borrows from the past, and filters it. Why shouldn’t Ellen White’s recognition of “soul sleep” happen to be a genuine insight?

Gardner’s criticisms of the science of the Urantia Book are very telling. He does a service to the Urantia movement by highlighting the “timebound” or erroneous data sprinkled through the first three Parts of the UB. He makes it clear that much of the UB’s science reflects the views, and is expressed in the style, of popular 1920’s scientific and semi-scientific literature. He also finds the UB’s political philosophy dated, characterizing the book’s call for world government as simply an echo of views advocated by U.S. President Woodrow Wilson. It never occurs to Gardner that a world government of the kind the described in the UB makes sense regardless of its historical associations.

One begins to wonder, though, about the amount of timebound or erroneous information in the Urantia Book, and whether all of its material should be taken literally. Were Adam and Eve real people? Were they in fact “biologic uplifters” from Jerusem, or are they mythical characters created by the revelators in an attempt to foster a “creation myth” suitable for the early to mid 20^th century. Gardner sees echoes of the Adam and Eve story in Sadler’s view of genetics and eugenics. They would be Dr. Sadler’s “creation myth”.

Moyer thinks that the more significant erroneous time bound data is the work of Caligastia via the channeling Christy, his attempt to corrupt the revelation. Indeed no one seems precisely to know just how many changes took place during this critical years from 1935 to 1942, the period on which Moyer focuses his attention. Moyer, and Mullins, based on Sadler’s off handed remarks concerning them, take these changes to be relatively few in number. Gardner, on the other hand, paints a picture of broad discrepancy between the UB and modern science. In the opinions of this reviewer, some of his criticisms are legitimate while others are not. Moyer believes that Caligastia began influencing events through a channeling Christy in 1939. He grants (in personal conversation) that since she was personally responsible for small changes to the UB between the first two printings, and even up to her death in 1982, Caligastia would still have possessed a channel into the Urantia Foundation at least until that date.

Moyer alludes to events and policies that punctuate the history of the Urantia Movement since 1955. Gardner, not surprisingly, portrays this history as nothing but a parade of silliness and gullibility based upon a colossal fiction. It is left to Mullins to provide us with the most detailed and helpful analysis of everything that had happened in the history of the UB and the movement that surrounds it.

From the autocratic structure of the Book’s controlling body, unpopular with some as far back as the 1930’s, to textual changes unknown and unapproved by more than one of the original members of the Urantia Foundation, Mullins builds a case for the Urantia Foundation’s legal and moral default of its own declaration of trust. He also elaborates on the significance of the elite circle within the elite group that became the Urantia Foundation. Three of the original members of the Foundation were also contact commissioners, those involved directly in the receipt of the revelation. This gave them, and Emma Christensen in particular, a special status that has had its continuing impact to the present day.

Gardner does not understand Christy’s significance to the whole UB story. Moyer and Mullins well understand it, and both point a finger firmly at her as the focal point of much of what has occurred in the Urantia Movement even after her death. Christy believed that she received communications from midwayers (presumably) and/or other members of the celestial planetary government. Other prominent persons in the movement (including the other two contact commissioner Trustees) since 1955 and up to her death also believed this, or at least accepted the claim as a means of justifying policy. Moyer believes this process began in 1939 after the death of Lena Sadler. If Larry is correct about the sleeping subject mechanism being in place at every instance of communication until 1955, this would have been impossible.

What happened after the last 1955 contact was made however is another matter. Both Moyer and Mullins note that changes to the text between the first two printings were primarily Christy’s responsibility. Larry notes carefully that the change process, and the belief (on the part of some members of the UF) that Christy had a “special relation to the text” and continued if infrequent contact with celestials, is a critical component in their default as a body, but more importantly continues to have consequences for our present situation. Mullins’ patient examination of the mechanisms of the real – pre 1955 – contacts cast serious doubt on the veracity of any of these contact claims.

Too bad no body thought to examine these matters in the early 1960s! Christy’s stature brought both Martin Myers and Vern Grimsley into prominence. She saw something she liked in both young men, and invested them with early authority in the movement thanks to her continued relationship to celestials. Myers subsequently grew to become the goliath of the Urantia Foundation slaying creative initiative in the use and distribution of the content of the UB on the part of reader-believers with ceaseless litigation. No one more than he, a believer in Christy’s messages, was responsible for the schism that still rends the Urantia Movement today, while Vern Grimsley picked up the mantle of Christy’s contact with celestials itself!

Less than a year after Christy died, Vern was contacted by the midwayers! What followed that episode sent Urantian’s all over the U.S. literally and figuratively packing for the hills. The events that occured between that date and dissolution of The Family Of God Foundation (FOG), Vern’s organization, in March of 1984 changed the Urantia Movement forever. Ironically, Myers recognized that his fraternity brother was deluded and stood fast against the early pull to consolidate power in Grimsley’s hands. In a double irony, the disaffected members of FOG still retained a measure of power and respect in the Urantia Movement, and ended up among the strongest opponents of the policies of Martin Myers with whom they had, until the time of Grimsley’s contact, been allies!

Based on Mullins work, one might go as far as to say that even if the UB is certifiably divine, the entire history of the Urantia Movement since the first printing of the book has been, and continues to be, based on a tissue of lies and false belief starting with Christy’s continued contact with celestials! Even this notion continues to find expression throughout the Urantia Movement! Like the “religion about Jesus” begun on that fateful day of Pentecost by Peter, The notion of contact with celestials is a very powerful draw. In the early 1990’s, after languishing for half a decade following the WWIII episode, not one, but numerous people came forth claiming to have been contacted. A whole new “phase of the revelation” was manifesting before our eyes (one way or another I’m afraid), and now, anyone could be contacted who desired it!

To Larry, this newest twist is yet another divisive event possibly fostered by the Urantia Foundation’s open declaration of their belief in the channeling activities of Christy: “We have reason to believe that none of the changes were made without the approval of the Revelators” they declare. Why shouldn’t celestials be talking to all of us? For Ernest, the present channeling wave is yet another channel of involvement by Caligastia who can disguise himself as anything and talk to anyone who simply declares him or herself open to chat! Lastly for Martin Gardner, it’s just another cycle in the silliness of UB readers proving only once again that some people will believe anything!

July 2001

As I was working on this review, another watershed event occurred in the history of The Urantia Book, and the movement. Both Martin Gardner and Larry Mullins touch on the subject of the Urantia Foundation’s litigious nature, a pattern solidified by Martin Myers, and based on a continuing Foundation claim to owning a copyright on the UB. Their original copyright expired in the early 1980’s, but they renewed it based, on a manifestly false claim, the UB was a “work for hire.”

Since that time, numerous Urantia Book readers have stepped forth in one way or another to challenge the Urantia Foundation’s right to a renewed copyright. The Foundation has predictably and consistently acted to protect its copyright claim by litigation, a process that has wasted millions of dollars and polarized the movement far more than even the recent spate of channeling. Gardner notes all of this infighting and suggests that it is still more evidence of the manifestly human origins of the book. Mullins more correctly recognizes that it is a reflection of the Book’s power; that many groups, some with conflicting claims, seek to attach themselves to it. Although Moyer doesn’t address these issues, he might justifiably note that all of the infighting that has gone on around this issue for the past 25 years might be in Caligastia’s interest.

The Urantia Foundation briefly lost its copyright in the mid 1990’s, but a judge’s order was overturned by another judge after a brief hiatus in the public domain. Now, in June of 2001, a jury in Oklahoma has now decided that the copyright renewal was invalid and The Urantia Book is once again in the public domain, this time, more securely (presumably) than it was before, though the Foundation has, of course, said it will appeal. This certainly presages a new era in the history of the Book. We can look forward to alternate printings in a variety of formats that may appeal to a wider audience. Whether this results in some resurgence of interest in the Book is difficult to predict. As in times past, we seem to take for granted that many people will be interested in this “pearl of great value”, but time and time again, our visions do not appear to materialize.

At least one of the missing ingredients has been the armies of dedicated believers whose lives are changed by contact with the UB and who subsequently share those changes with others. For decades those opposed to the copyright have argued that this continuing claim (and of course the litigation that follows from it) has acted to suppress the growth of private and public ministries that will elevate the Book into the religious consciousness of the Earth’s people. If this was a suppressive influence, it is now mostly gone. It remains to be seen if its absence makes a significant difference.

Matthew Rapaport

Book Review: Salvation Not Purchased by Stephen Finlan

In this well written book, Dr. Finlan takes pains to emphasize the positive. Given his subject, this isn’t entirely possible since he is inveigling against a major pillar of Christianity throughout the world. The most powerful argument against the Atonement is that it is illogical, in fact impossible if God is infinite and changeless (see “Prolegomena to a Future Theology”). Finlan covers this argument but briefly in the beginning of the book. In a later chapter on sacrifice in the earliest Christian literature, he points out how very little of it is present (see review reproduced below). He does note the strong re-emergence of the Atonement idea in the further evolution of Catholicism, and much more so in Protestantism. He explores the psychological roots of this process, something that, as a minister, must interest him deeply. What he does not explore, what he seems deliberately to leave out, are the political and financial implications of the doctrine to the institution of “the Church”.

Finlan points out that sacrifice to propitiate or magically manipulate “the gods” was likely practiced from very early in the human experience. The peoples of Europe and Palestine in Jesus’ time were used to the practice, a part of their “ritual calendar”, and in the Hebrew case recorded in their holy book, and cemented into their experience in both Egypt and Babylon. That such practice was inconsistent with an infinite and changeless God was noted by some of the main Hebrew prophets. The compilers of the Old Testament were liberal enough to include these minority voices in their document, though minority that they were, the practice of sacrifice continued, but at least for the Hebrews transformed from human to animal. Interestingly, while Finlan notes that the earliest Christian writings (sans Paul) had very little of sacrifice, they also contained no direct criticism of Paul’s sacrificial idea. There aren’t any “minority voices” challenging Paul’s ideas, at least not in the records that have come down to us.

Paul’s references to ransom and other sacrificial metaphors were not so radical an idea in his time, though they misrepresented Jesus’ purpose. What was radical was Paul’s idea of “last sacrifice”. Thanks to Jesus (according to Paul) no more sacrifice was needed, ever. Jesus’ death ended sacrificial requirements forever! By Jesus’ time, the Hebrew, Roman, and Greek cultures had abandoned human sacrifice and substituted animals. Paul may be credited with ending even this practice as Christianity took root in that part of the world. Of course it did not end elsewhere. Hebrew sacrificial practice did not end until the temple was destroyed and the Jews disbursed some forty years after Jesus’ death. In Rome, sacrificial practice likely continued until Constantine made the new Christianity the “religion of Rome” in 313 AD. The Aztec practiced human sacrifice until the coming of the Europeans to South and Central America in the 16th century! But rather than eliminate the sacrifice idea altogether, the evolving church transformed it, from an external ritual, innocent animals, to an internal one, the not so innocent human being.

A church is a physical and social institution. It wants buildings and, in the case of Catholicism (most religions though) a hierarchy of priests who must be fed, clothed, housed, and so on. But imagine that the evolving church proclaimed what Jesus actually taught, that God is a “Universal Father” and that all peoples, the men and women of all cultures everywhere on earth, were God’s children and therefore brothers. In a view derived from the infinity and changelessness of God (qualities Jesus understood well though he could not convey them in a way that made them stick) this relationship is true, and has always been true, no matter what one’s intellectual beliefs, culture, race or geographic location. While it is obvious that not everyone on earth in Jesus’ time or today believes this, it remains a truth. Atheists and religionists alike are all children of God!

Jesus tried to make it clear that salvation was tied to membership in this brotherhood. Humans are born into it and are saved by default. You need not even believe in salvation or brotherhood to be saved. All you need do is not screw up the gift which you can do only by freely electing to be evil to such an extent that you eventually lose the ability to tell the difference between good and evil (see “What is the Soul?” and “Theodicy in the Urantia Book”). What you must do is demonstrate your spiritual (not intellectual) recognition of the truth of brotherhood by acting like a brother, that is by treating others with love, respect, fairness, and so on, that is, “doing good”.

So why have a church at all? While religion is individual, your relationship with God, its fruits are necessarily social. You cannot go about doing good unless you are, at least occasionally, around others in social settings. It is natural for people who share beliefs in this vicinity to gather together for social and psychological reinforcement. One can do good and practice the social outworking of one’s religion among people anywhere, but it it is also good to refresh one’s outlook on the process by periodically coming together with others who also come into a fellowship because they share this outlook.

Had such a process been followed out socially and politically, resulting churches would be smallish, local, congregations that support their own physical infrastructure, choose the form of their services, and otherwise have no formal relation to other congregations except those they enter into by their own congregational choice. There would be no priestly hierarchy though individual congregations might choose to finance full or part-time ministers. Creedal doctrine, if there is any at all, would emerge at the level of individual congregations, and individuals would be free to leave one and join another. It should be obvious that under this model no large-scale rich and powerful institutional church could possibly emerge.

Yet men (some men) crave power. Prior to the Gospel message in the Roman world there were religious institutions, Mithra-ism being the dominant one in Rome in Paul’s time. Prior to modern times, members of various priestly hierarchies (and not only in Rome, but worldwide) were among the better off classes financially, socially, and politically. As Paul told it, the Jesus story had many parallels in Mithraic myth. The formal structure of Catholicism, as compared to spontaneous congregations of various Christian (meaning only believers in Jesus) groups, sprang from mithra-ism. The Urantia Book credits Paul with convincing the political powers of the Mithraic cult to substitute Jesus and Peter, “his rock”, for Mithras in exchange for adopting Mithraic rituals (like the winter solstice festival becoming Christmas) leaving the priestly hierarchy in place. If this is the case it means that the nascent core of Catholicism sprang into existence during Paul’s lifetime.

Salvation for all who believed in God and accepted the gift became salvation for those who became members of the Church and did so by accepting Paul’s idea that Jesus’ “sacrifice” was for them, while the sacrificial theme was carried through the believer through his or her dedication of both material wealth (proportional to individual means) and work, to the Church. Universal brotherhood became a brotherhood of believers, and the brotherhood was cemented by acceptance of Christ’s sacrifice for the believer. Sacrifice of wealth (among other things) to “temples of the gods” was common in that day as it remains in ours. Paul’s notion of “final sacrifice” did put an end to the slaughter of innocent animals (not to mention the occasional person) in the Roman world at least, and the sacrificial notions made for a nice segue into a doctrinal pillar of the new Church. No longer was it the literal sacrifice of an animal, but rather a sacrifice of one’s self to the Church whose believers were saved and the salvation made real by Christ’s blood.

Dr. Finlan asks why the sacrificial idea has had such sticking power. He devotes two chapters to the subject, but he ignores this particular reason, the power of the idea as a hook securing the relation between believer and Church. Catholicism of course had more than one hook, the intercession of the clergy and “original sin”, being others. Paul’s radical idea was also supposed to put an end to original sin. Jesus’ sacrifice wiped away the sin (of being born), but the Church could hardly abandon original sin without risking their socio-political hold on the believer. If I am not, automatically, a sinner, why must I become a Church member to have eternal life?

Original sin and Atonement became, therefore linked together. I am a sinner, and Jesus died for me, became the door into the Church and salvation. Protestantism abandoned the intercession idea and this perhaps explains why they then put such emphasis on original sin and Atonement. I suspect Dr. Finlan knows all of this, but he elides the political implications of Atonement for the Church out of a desire to avoid unnecessary political antagonism in a book that, in the end, promulgates a positive message of the love of an infinite and changeless God.

Salvation Not Purchased (2020) by Stephen Finlan

Stephen Finlan holds a doctorate in theology from the University of Durham (2004) and has written several books on the Christian Atonement Doctrine. His latest effort appears aimed at a lay audience. Finlan’s writing is conversational, not technical. It is almost as if the chapters emerge out of sermons delivered on the subject in the New England church he presently pastors. Not that there isn’t scholarship here. Every page contains biblical examples (spelled out) and references to other authors (in chapter notes) all enhancing and not impeding the flow of his narrative.

Atonement, the idea that Christ died to reconcile God to man (Finlan distinguishes four variations on reconcilliation) is an idea that infuses every branch of Christianity, though I learn from this book that it is not so much emphasized by the Eastern Christian churches (Greek or Russian Orthodox) as it is in Western Roman Catholicism, and especially in Protestantism. He notes, the idea seems to have taken on a life of its own since the Protestant Reformation and on down to the present day, an emphasis that was not nearly so prevalent in the early Christian church, not even in the letters of Paul who Finlan credits with the development of the doctrine. But while Paul surely did lay the foundations of the doctrine as it entered Christianity, Finlan claims Paul did not mean his redemption and sacrifice metaphors to be taken as literally as subsequent generations have taken them. Finlan points out that in speaking of Jesus’s political murder and miscarriage of justice, Paul deliberately mixed up his metaphors suggesting a message about Christ’s forgiveness of our sins even in his death, and not an attempt to forge a salvation mechanism out of Jesus’s brutal murder.

Finlan begins by pointing out that the Atonement, as it has come down to modern times, is inconsistent with the portrait of God Jesus painted in his life. It is, in fact inconsistent with the very idea of an “infinite Father”, and in particular one who is changeless! In his first chapters, he deals with this issue in the abstract. Philosophically speaking, Paul was wrong to go down that path, but to be fair he could not have foreseen how his poetic excess would be crystallized into stifling doctrine centuries later.

Finlan then asks why this sacrificial idea has so much power? He reviews the sacrificial ritual history of the Jews, Romans, and Greeks, noting that while sacrifice was universal in that age, even many of the Hebrew prophets understood that God did not want sacrifice but rather righteousness. Nevertheless, while recorded, the voice of these prophets amounted to minority opinions, the sacrificial practices continuing on down to Jesus’s time. The culture of Jesus’s time and place was steeped in the sacrificial idea.

Next he moves on to an investigation of sacrifice in the early centuries after Jesus, and notes that there is very little of the notion in the earliest writings except for Paul, and the few references that appear in other writings that come down to us were inserted at later dates. They are not present in the earliest surviving [Greek] texts. Even Paul (Finlan points out) wrote much more about love, community, relationship (brotherhood) and faith (God gives salvation freely, one has only to believe it) than redemption by Jesus’s death.

Moving forward in time, Finlan explores how the Atonement idea became crystallized in the later Catholic church and particularly in Protestantism which, even today, preserves it in an extreme form. Finlan follows his historical review with a chapter on the corrosive psychological effects of the doctrine both in the genesis of Protestantism (Calvinism being the most extreme example) and on down to the present day. We are not culturally inured to the idea of sacrifice to propitiate an angry God. As a result, Atonement cannot help but confuse modern Christians who are told that God is entirely good, and yet, in this doctrine, survives the notion of a God whose heart must be softened by the death of his innocent son. Finlan ends the book with a chapter on Christology emphasizing what Jesus did and said in his life rather than putting so much emphasis on his death.

The Atonement idea should long ago have been purged from the Christian faith. It is inconsistent with the goodness of an infinite “Father God” whose changeless attitude toward all of his children has always been love and salvation, eternal life, a free gift requiring only a sincere desire to do God’s will and love others. Dr. Finlan not only gets all the arguments right, his writing is elegant and persuasive. One can only hope that this little book eases the minds of many confused Christians with Jesus’s real message: God is a good and loving Father, and salvation is a free gift to any who sincerely seek it.

Book Review: God’s Grand Game by Steven Colborne

As noted in the review itself (included below) this is the worst theological idea I have ever read. In literally every chapter (maybe but one) there is some contradiction. But all of them, with but a couple of minor variations, stem from the author’s one grand mistake. His failure to recognize that a truely infinite, eternal God is not limited, in creation, to the temporal! Colborne misunderstands the nature of time, that while we, human mind and with particular regard to its creative powers, are stuck in an eternal now of succession, God, who purportedly is the creator of time, is not so limited. As concerns God, the creation of other entities, other creation, that are also eternal with Him, persons who were begat but nevertheless “have, like God, no beginning” are not square circles, not logical impossibilities.

Once that truth (something that must be true of an infinite and self-consistent God) is accepted, Colborne’s entire theological idea falls apart. It is in the creation of such persons, two conjoint eternal persons, that God escapes from the logical trap that Colborne thinks he sets. God can continue to uphold everything. He remains, after all, the only absolute source. But he is able to withdraw from actually having to do everything. By creating others to whom God gives powers to do (and then sharing in that doing) God sets a pattern that imprints itself on the entire universe (the Father creates the Son and together they share in creating the Spirit), including the physical, at least as soon as persons are able to be made within it. Not only does this make the reality of free will possible (in direct contradiction to Colborne), but it inverts everything Colborne concludes. The living universe is filled with various degrees of free will. Free will that has risen to the personal level, partners with God (if it so chooses, the freedom is real after all) in the evolution (in the case of biological humans on physical worlds) of the physical universe itself.

Colborne’s idea is the ultimate skepticism, even as concerns God. Not only can we not know for sure anything about what seems to be our genuine experience (there being after all no real us to know anything), but except for the assumption that one entity (God) exists, we cannot know anything about Him either given that Colborne’s theology makes God a deceiver! I’m not going to use a lot of space refuting him in detail. It should be obvious that if God literally, personally, and directly does everything that is done, and if at the same time God is literally everything and everything is God (Colborne asserts all of this), there is no room for anything else. But why would anyone embrace such an absurd self-negating idea? If Colborne was right, he had nothing to do with his book. God did it all. Nor have I anything to do with this critical essay, God did that too. Why? If none of this is really how it seems it can have no meaning, not only to ourselves (strictly speaking we are nothing but figments of God’s imagination) but even to God! Such a God is if not psychotic, at least very neurotic, and I think that is the clue we need to answer the why question!

Colborne tells us a bit about himself at the beginning of the book. He had a hard growing-up punctuated by psychotic episodes. I’m certainly not qualified to analyze him, but one has to suspect that his whole theology absolves him of something. What? Responsibility. Neither he, nor you, nor I are ever responsible for anything! Further (and Colborne mentions this), if your brain is in some small way defective, you are not responsible for any psychosis anyway, but how much better if not only are you not responsible for the problem, but that God actually wants things this way. He must! After all he could fix that defect right now if he so willed it. You may not know why he wants that defect, but it doesn’t matter because first there isn’t any you anyway, and if something is the case, it can only be God making it happen right now! If there is no free will after all, not only is nothing any of our responsibility, but even better there is nothing any of us can do about it because this is the way God wants things, and this also includes the most depraved evil!

I put this review and commentary up because it so contrasts with a vision of an infinite God who is self-consistent and therefore wholly good. To get an idea of the magnitude of the difference this implies here are some links..

A self-consistent first principles theology: Prolegomena to a Future Theology
On ethics, God as a pointer to the value direction: What are Truth, Beauty, and Goodness?
On free will and the point of all this creation: Why Free Will?
On mind able to comprehend genuine truth: From what comes Mind?

What is evil and why does it exist if God is good?: Theodicy in the Urantia Book

Each of these essays contain pointers to many others. On the absurdity of the “no free will” idea for example see: Arguing with Automatons.

God’s Grand Game (2019) by Steven Colborne

In this short book, Steven Colborne offers us a complete, if shortened, theology, a “theory of God”. It is, in my opinion, the worst theory of God I have ever read, not merely because it is wrong (no human thinker gets everything right about God), but because its error amounts to God being evil. Why then three stars and not two or one? I appreciate the scope of Colborne’s effort. He covers a lot here, and he writes well. Beginning from reasonable premises he makes one grand logical error and from that he courageously drives his theory to its conclusion. He is honest about all of this effort, carefully distinguishing between what he claims must follow from his idea, and what amounts to further speculation. Mostly, his conclusions (while wrong thanks to the big error) follow from his premises, until the last chapter where he fails to stay consistently within the boundaries he himself sets (see below). The problem is that some of what falls out of his analysis makes God a whimsical child who, for his own entertainment, puts both pleasure and pain into creation!

The theory is not entirely new. It has within it a theological idea called “occasionalism” which holds that everything that happens is “occasioned”, that is made to happen, by God, personally and directly. Colborne also folds in an 18th Century idealism popularized by George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne in the first half of the 1700s. In Berkeley’s idealism, every perception we have of the physical world is put into our mind’s by God. Nothing of the physical world exists independently of God’s keeping it before (or in) our mind’s directly. This includes also all our thoughts, beliefs, desires, and so on. Everything we call consciousness is put there, moment by moment, by God himself. Colborne is not an idealist (if God wants a mind-independent world he can create one), but the way his theory comes out it doesn’t really make any difference. Is the tree we both see in front of us really there or does God put it into both our heads? Given his radical occasionalism we cannot tell the difference.

Colborne begins reasonably enough. God must be infinite, eternal, omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, and possessed of unconstrained free will save for the creation of logical impossibilities (like square circles). He affirms what is called the “doctrine of divine conservation” which means that God must, at every moment, uphold all of universe reality. Put simply, if God blinked, there would be nothing and not something! Colborne errs in assuming that divine conservation entails occasionalism. He goes from “God could do everything that happens” (true) to “God does do everything that happens” (false) and on to “God must do everything that happens”. In this last move, Colborne declares free will impossible, like a square circle, completely forgetting that since God is infinitely free, he can uphold, and he can permit or allow, without actually doing everything. God can be the upholder without being the only doer in the universe. Who are the other doers? Well among others perhaps, at least us!

The evil in the theology really gets going here. To Colborne, nothing anyone does has anything to do with any freedom they think they have. He denies he is a pantheist, but his idea amounts to pantheism. Everything is God and God is everything, not merely in the sense that God everywhere upholds it all, but that he is personally doing it all. If I save a child from drowning, really God did it. If I murder you, really God did it. No matter what, good or bad (Colborne denies God is a source of the moral direction — a pointer to the true, beautiful, and good), physical, or mental (all of your thoughts, pains, pleasures) are really God playing at being a you. Colborne recognizes that human beings appear to themselves to be free willed agents, particularly in the moral domain. We cannot freely fly, but we can choose that which we perceive as more (or less) true, beautiful, or good. Indeed there seems to be no bounds on our moral freedom. But all of this is illusion according to Colborne. God is a deceiver by his lights, itself a violation of the principle of God’s consistency and unity! I have never used the term blasphemy in a review, I don’t even believe in the concept, but I think it might fit this book.

After driving at all of these conclusions based on his fundamental mistake (failing to see that while God could do everything, his freedom permits him not to have to do everything), Colborne offers us an analysis of various world religions pointing out that we didn’t invent any of them, they are all God literally “playing around”, and yes, even contradicting himself! But in a final chapter, he suggests that his idea, it’s all only God, would be a sound basis for inter-faith dialogue. But that inter-faith dialogue has any value at all presupposes free will which Colborne denies exists. If we talk, it is only God talking to himself. If we kill one another, it is only God messing around with his puppet soldiers. God’s whim either way, nothing more.

Unless you are just curious about Colborne’s extreme and morally vacuous theological idea, I cannot really recommend this book!

Review: The Despot’s Apprentice by Brian Klaas

Another of my review of Trump books. This one not about the daily doings of the administration, but more a psychological profile of Donald Trump and what he is doing to imitate autocrats and tyrants in an effort to erode American political institutions. Why? Like many autocrats (Trump a wanna-be autocrat, Klaas illustrates with many examples of real ones throughout the book) Trump does not seem strongly wedded to a political ideology. Rather his aim seems to be to keep himself in power as long as possible while enriching himself and his family.

Most autocrats leave it at that, but some become also despots by adding to the mix a fragile ego that thrives on self-aggrandizement, a characteristic of those who commit atrocities. Trump is, alas, in this group as well, or would be if there weren’t powerful institutions around to constrain him, the very institutions he is doing his best to erode!

Most interestingly, this book was written in 2017, less than a full year into Trump’s first term. Even then, he has exercised (or attempted to exercise) every trick of every autocrat (or despot) Klaas uses in his examples!

The other book reviews in this series (Trump) are listed a few paragraphs down in this link here.

The Despot’s Apprentice (2017) by Brian Klaas

Another in what is now a considerable series of books about the problematic Trump administration. Unlike the others I’ve reviewed, this one is less about day to day happenings in the West Wing, nor any history of how we got here. It is rather a comparison between the sorts of things Trump does personally (berate the media, accuse non-partisan government agencies of conspiring against him, dissemble, amass family wealth, and much more) and the acts of autocrats around the world both past and present. As it turns out, most of the autocrats do most of these things, but Trump does all of them. But Trump also adds in a fragile ego, and relative ignorance of the political process, something even most (though not all) of the real autocrats used for comparison, do not suffer.

The book’s chapters are not divided up by time or crisis, but by type of autocrat-like behavior. For example Trump’s attacks on free press, the politicization of non-partisan institutions (Trump has accused the Office of Management and Budget of conspiring against him), nepotism, personal and family financial gain, misdirection in foreign policy, and so on. Klaas begins almost every chapter with a brief review of one or more famous examples of such abuse either from history or today’s headlines. He does not neglect past American presidential examples either. The amazing thing about Trump is that he engages in all of them at the same time. More unbelievable still, this book was written less than one year after Trump formally took office! Now, almost four years into his term, the most alarming thing is that so many of these abuses are to a great degree taken for granted, or “the new normal” by the institutions that should be calling them out! The free press has stopped beating the drum because their audience has largely dialed out, and what used to be non-partisan institutions (the OMB, intelligence agencies, FBI, NASA [believe it or not]) are largely cowed into silence with “trump loyalists” dominating the upper echelons of their leadership.

To be sure, Klaas notes, America is not an autocratic nation, and Trump is no autocrat. But he does show every inclination to want-to-be an autocrat and that in itself is dangerous particularly when surrounded by other powerful people who want much the same thing. Further, the degree of political polarization in the United States, a social and political phenomenon that began long before Trump, becomes much more detrimental to the survival of a plural society and democratic regime when a want-to-be autocrat comes along and takes advantage of it. Trump has leveraged the polarization for his own personal gain and in so doing amplified it. If it was always difficult to bring both sides of the American polity together, it is rapidly becoming impossible.

Despot’s Apprentice is a short book that says a lot. Unfortunately, those who dislike Trump basically know all this about him already. For them this book will do no more than apprise them of the vast depth and breath of his malfeasance. For the others, the 30% of Americans who now believe (so the polls say) that a free press are the “enemy of the people”, such books as this will not be read thanks to the magnified political polarity Trump has deliberately fostered, and that is precisely the point of it all!

Book Review: The Room Where It Happened by John Bolton

Once again, for consistency sake (there being little of additional philosophical import) I include this review of John Bolton’s memoir of 18 months working as National Security Advisor from April 2018 to September 2019 for the Trump administration. It would I think be unfair of me to criticize Bolton on the basis of my politics compared to his. In point of fact I do not disagree with some of his assessment of threat situations. Iran and North Korea will never give up development/possession/proliferation of “weapons of mass destruction” (nuclear or otherwise). Bolton is quite right I think to believe that the only way to stop these developments is with overwhelming military force, but he is far to sanguine about assessments that, in response, millions of people (especially South Koreans) would die.

Is there any other option? India and Pakistan (bitter enemies for 72 years) possess nuclear weapons (Pakistan also a known proliferator) for some decades now and neither have used them (the potential collapse of the Pakistani State being another kind of problem). Perhaps there are sensible means of preventing N. Korea or Iran from ever using their weapons? In this respect, not sanctions, but trade and economic engagement make more sense. Why? Because when you tighten economic and diplomatic screws to the point where a people figure they have “nothing else to lose”, you provoke war rather than prevent it. Bolton knows history well enough to know this. He also knows what happened to Qaddafi in Libya after he gave up his weapons programs, yet dismisses this history as though it mattered not to Iranian, and especially to N. Korean calculations.

So I differ from Bolton on these matters, but I am not sure enough about my own views to say Bolton must be wrong. In any case this chasm between us does not take away from his observations and criticism of Trump’s administration concerning both substance and (more importantly) its lack of consistency, not to mention Trump’s self-serving, ego-maniacal fixations.

Like the other books reviewed in this series (“Fire and Fury”, “Fear”, “A Warning” “Devil’s Bargain”, “A Very Stable Genius”, and “The Despot’s Apprentice”), this is a frightening book and the only one of the six reviewed focused on foreign policy.

The Room where it Happened (2020) by John Bolton

People mostly either like or dislike John Bolton based on their alignment with his politics. I do not see him that way. I have had jobs (never in government) where my role was to highlight and advocate for some specific aspect of a corporate hardware and software infrastructure. Bolton’s job was to advocate for the national security interests of the United States, and of course the recommendations he made (like mine) flowed from his background, experience, and yes, politics.

His experience is the key here, for Bolton has consummate knowledge of the workings of international institutions and also the governments they serve. He has also an appreciation for geopolitical history and isn’t afraid to call out a pointless exercise when he sees it. In part his politics is informed by his historical knowledge, for example the duplicity of nations like Iran, North Korea, and yes also China and Russia, with regard to respecting treaty obligations. But if anything makes Bolton more angry than Trump’s waffling and sometime expressed admiration for tyrants, it is his treatment of our own allies, the EU (NATO), Japan, and South Korea in particular. All this is revealed!

This book is about what Bolton found himself facing from April 2018 until September 2019, Eighteen short (must have seemed very long to him) months in the middle of Donald Trump’s administration. Reorganization of the NSA early in his tenure, the book touches on every new and on-going global threat of the time stemming from North Korea, Syria, Iran, Venezuela, Russia, China, and others. Each of these regions is a fount of over-lapping threats.

Bolton is in a unique position to appreciate the complexity of these situations. He castigates the Obama administration on a few matters, but points out, with some irony, that Trump’s instincts sometimes paralleled Obama! With regard to North Korea he is fair enough to note that none of the past four administrations (two Republican and two Democratic) have accomplished anything useful. When he alludes to differences in procedural style between Trump and former administrations, he mentions only the prior Republican administrations for whom he worked.

Very much this book is a detailed account of the operation of the Trump administration as concerns foreign national security issues with an occasional domestic matter (the Mexican border, Russia’s 2016 election interference) crossing the line. Although the NSA is involved in these matters, Bolton does his best to minimize his role in them, preferring the more global threats whether immediate or more temporally distant. As with my own some-time role in corporations, Bolton does not expect his boss to agree with his every recommendation. He notes that as goes national security, Trump’s instincts are often like his own. The problems threaded throughout the book are concerned with Trump’s flip-flopping almost constantly on matters where waffling, with mixed signals sent via tweets to the world, is universally detrimental to the outcome we want, that is a more, and not less, secure United States. There are a even a few examples, (to my politics not Bolton’s) where the President made the right call (even if for the wrong reasons) over Bolton’s recommendation as when Trump chose not to risk Iranian lives (Iranian body bags would make him look bad) in exchange for an American drone!

The bigger problem, as Bolton sees it, is that the decisions Trump does make, whether coming out right or wrong for national security, are made only on the basis of what Trump thinks makes him look good in the press, helps him in the 2020 election, or furthers the enrichment of his family! Along with all of this come also problems with the bureaucracy surrounding Trump. Bolton is an astute critic of bureaucracies in general (see his “Surrender is not an Option” also reviewed) and where warranted, individuals who do little to serve the organization’s purpose. In this regard the Trump administration is no different than others except for the extraordinary number of musical chair events and as consequence the style and substance variations already and still passing through this administration — including of course now Bolton himself.

In only a couple of places in the body of the book does Bolton call attention to what his government book reviewers forced him to remove. In an epilogue he describes a little more of this process but on the whole does not seem too unhappy with its results. He also offers a critique of the House impeachment process that got going after he left the NSA. This short analysis is among the most telling of Bolton’s real feelings about his time as National Security Advisor. He does not say that Trump should not have been impeached. The Ukraine matter over which the House obsessed was, in Bolton’s opinion, only one, and a lesser one at that, of Trump’s potentially impeachable offenses! The House should have taken more time, let the court processes (for documents) complete themselves at their own pace, and evidence of more serious malfeasance would have turned up! By rushing the job for political reasons, the Democrats shot themselves in the foot, and left Trump more unconstrained than he was before. No one, after all, is going to try to impeach him again!

Review: The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells

Some months ago I reviewed Slavoj Zizek’s “The Courage of Hopelessness”. I suggested that Zizek’s political projections would have little chance of materializing because economic collapse precipitated by climate mitigation efforts in the rich world would overwhelm everything else in but a few short decades. Next I came across G. Gaul’s “Geography of Risk” which, though focusing on storms and sea-level effects on the U.S. East and Gulf coasts, supported my prediction. Now this, “The Uninhabitable Earth” (review & link below), comes along amplifying everything in the Gaul book and laying down an even more frightening picture not only about where present trends are taking us, but the almost certain inevitability of vast tracts of the equatorial and presently-temperate Earth becoming uninhabitable by 2100.

Most of the cascades described by Wallace-Wells have already been triggered and will not stop (though they would slow a bit) even if we ceased all industry-related atmospheric carbon production tomorrow, something that is obviously not going to happen. Technology (as he points out) is not going to save us this time. We do know how to pull carbon out of the air yes, but as Wallace-Wells shows, we cannot afford to deploy enough of it fast enough to block a two to three degree (celsius) rise in average global temperatures over the next 75 years.

Wallace-Wells is (non-optimistically) hopeful that humanity will wake up in time to stop carbon output at least soon enough to halt future warming at three degrees. In fact I believe human industrial carbon output (most of it, globally) will cease in another ten or twenty years, roughly when we are close to two degrees of warming (as of 2018 we were at one degree and some change with atmospheric carbon rising faster now, year on year, than it has ever before). But it won’t stop because humans wake up and do something about the problem. It will stop because all of the economies of the world will have collapsed. Over a few decades, people will starve (or die from disease and war) in such vast numbers that few will be left to put any substantial carbon into the atmosphere more than the cooking fires that could be found dotting the Earth ten thousand years ago. The human population will be about where it was ten thousand years ago. That might be by 2100, likely sooner than that.

Still all of the cascades, devastating forest fires and melting permafrost will yet be releasing billions of tons of carbon even in the absence of human industry, and of course ocean levels will continue to rise utterly changing the geography of the world. By 2200 there will be very few places on Earth where food can be grown or hunted and the human race may be reduced to levels barely able to avoid extinction, if even that. If this isn’t frightening enough, the news gets worse from here. Even if the temperature rise tops out at three or four degrees, the planet will not again return to a cooler, human-comfortable climate regime, for thousands, possibly tens-of-thousands, of years!

Here is another book on the subject reinforcing the idea that we are in bigger trouble than we think: “Water” by Steven Solomon, 2011

Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells 2018

This book opens with what, for me, was a surprise. I know that carbon emissions have, world-wide, steadily increased even since the first international “climate mitigation agreements” of thirty years ago. What I did not know is that since 1990, the world, collectively, has pumped twice as much carbon into the atmosphere as it did in the thirty years from 1960 to 1990. There are other surprises: Bitcoin anyone? Sure there’s some electricity involved but how much carbon could that be? It turns out to be about as much, per year, as one million international jet flights! Our own industrial activity is only a part (albeit still a large part) of the problem now. Other, cascading effects, are now adding their impact. Global wild-fires now consume, on average, ten times as much forest every year as they did thirty years ago. That’s a lot of extra carbon. Even worse, the world’s permafrost is beginning to melt releasing carbon in the form of methane which, depending on whether we are speaking of low or high altitude, has between four and eighty times the warming effect of carbon dioxide.

The title of the book is prescient. Think of the climatologically worst environments on the Earth today (having warmed a bit more than one degree Celsius since the beginning of the industrial revolution in 1800. We are on track to hit two degrees by 2050 or so), perhaps the middle of the Sahara, Arizona in the summer, or someplace where it never stops being hot and raining. These are today’s most inhospitable climate environments. By 2100, that sort of place will be among the best and most livable we have on Earth. Large parts of our world will be largely and literally uninhabitable, places where humans die because their bodies cannot cool themselves by sweating unless immersed in cool water, or because there is no water the glaciers being gone, and this at only three degrees of warming (2100).

The first third of the book is about various cascades, most already triggered, some on the verge. Effects of warming add up both by directly making things worse and by degrading the planet’s ability to absorb carbon and mitigate the other effects. Wallace’s picture here is very dire. In the rest of the book, Wallace deals with the economic, political, social, and psychological future. Here I do not think he is dire enough. He speaks of refugees in the tens of millions (try hundreds of millions), extremist movements on both the right and left, of wars, pandemics, crop failures, of collapsing economies unable to sustain the cost of climate mitigation, and that only the economies that can afford any mitigation to begin with. The rest will have since joined the refugees. Wallace touches on all of this, but I do not think he fully appreciates how quickly and thoroughly human beings can (and will) turn on one another long before this all becomes as bad as it’s going to get!

Technology will not save us. Wallace covers that too. We can desalinate water and even pull carbon out of the air. There will never be enough of either that the world can afford. Besides, both are energy-intensive processes, and even if powered with renewable energy, that is not easy to do as concerns the long chain of activities needed to build and maintain that technology. Solar and wind power, for that matter almost all modern electronics, require elements called “rare earths”. Rare-Earth mining is a carbon-intensive process.

In the end, Wallace is hopeful, though not optimistic, that the global polity will wake up and de-carbonize the global economy, not in time to halt two to three degrees of warming, it is already too late for that, but in time to prevent it going to four degrees or more. I think he is over-optimistic here too. It is simply not possible, politically, and this for economic reasons, for soon-to-be nine-billion humans to de-carbonize as quickly as needed to hold the line at two to three degrees. What will force the race to de-carbonize will be economic collapse, leading to socio-political collapse, leading to mass death (over some decades) from starvation, disease, or war. I think Wallace sees this grim possibility. He hopes it isn’t inevitable.

This a good and timely book though I doubt it will have much effect on the carbon trajectory of our so-called civilization. It is good to see the ground covered as much as Wallace covers it. He does a good job of showing how the climatological and the political go together (alas perversely). I think he fails to draw some obvious conclusions from his own well-made points. Perhaps it’s for the better. He would be accused of doom saying. I am a doomsayer! Feel free to accuse me! Meanwhile, the book is frightening enough as it is!

Process Theology in the Urantia Book

“Process Theology” is a term The Urantia Book (UB from here on out, good e-book editions about $4 here) does not use. Yet is does speak much about the subject. Indeed one could argue that more than half the book is about process theology whether directly or (mostly) indirectly.

In the philosophy of the 20th Century, there emerged “process philosophy” (though as with everything else this had its roots in Ancient Greece, in this case Heraclitus). The fundamental idea in Process Philosophy is that, as goes the basic ontology of the universe, it isn’t “the stuff” that comes first and then undergoes transformation and change. Rather transformation and change itself, movement in time, is the fundamental, and “the stuff” is what it is because it is the outcome of change and time. But what can change if there’s no stuff? This a vexing question for process, and the appearance of quantum mechanics in the early decades of the 20th century is what gave to process its present cache. No one can say of what “the stuff” of the quantum world is, or even that it is. But we can identify process taking place and we believe that all of “the stuff” in the macroscopic universe comes through it!

Process Theologians took this idea from Process Philosophers and applied it to God. We live, obviously in a changing and imperfect universe. Perhaps God is not the existential, changeless, infinite person, outside of time, but instead comes to exist inside time when the universe finally reaches its perfect state, a direction (extracted from Christian theology) they take it to be going. There may be process theologians associated with non-Christian religions (Buddhism especially comes to mind) I do not know their work. Christian-derived process theology at least is very parochial, a mistake the UB takes pains to correct.

What is the nature of this projected perfection? According to Teilhard de Chardin the collective mental life of all the people of the Earth, something he called “the Noosphere”, the “mental” arena consisting of all the people of the planet, reaches (some day) an “Omega Point” when the minds of all humans became unified. In a sense God emerges as collectively us. This would serve to detach our collective mentality from the biosphere (how exactly Teilhard doesn’t say) and this unified collective mind would become the God of Time.

Unification in Teilhard’s sense involves all facets of the mental. God cannot be unified if parts of him hold contrary opinions about something. The UB affirms a part of this. We do, collectively, become integral to the functioning in time of God made manifest in time, but that manifestation of God is his own person, and our individuality, our personal subjective viewpoints, remain. It is not, for the UB, a unification of minds that achieves this, but a unification of wills about a single point. Every individual on the world (in fact on every world everywhere, more on this below) comes to freely will “to do the Father’s will”.

What is the Father’s will? However it is described, it comes out to love for others, one’s brothers and sisters, the spiritual family of a world. What is love? “Love is the desire to do good to others” [UB 56:10.21], and this is the sum and substance of the unity we are supposed to achieve. Love however, this “desire to do good” is also a product of value (truth, beauty, goodness) discrimination, something of which only humans, and not animals, are capable. It is this power that constitutes a discriminating moral capacity. Even animals can love and do good, but they cannot think about these things in the abstract. They can act “out of love”, but not abstractly “because it is good”. There is much more to be said about this subject, but apart from the requirement that we achieve universal love, the details are not pertinent to the process theology story. For more detail on the relation between the values and human free will see “Why Free Will?” As concerns the values themselves, see “What are Truth, Beauty, and Goodness?”

The unification criteria come out to the free choice of each individual to do “the Father’s will” however one looks at it. The people unified around this choice remain individuals rooted in their biology. They don’t think alike, They still have contrary opinions, they still make mistakes. The one thing they unify on is the individual desire to do the will of God. Not until a world reaches this stage of social evolution is it considered a finished product, what the UB calls a “settled world”.

Process theology then is a tidy solution to the problem of God’s interaction with the universe. We are the instruments of that action. But Teilhard’s idea is beset with tricky problems. Does the Omega Point arise purely out of the collective will of living persons, or does it also include those who have died (and in some sense and place survive) over the history of our world? If the former, the whole of the scheme doesn’t seem very fair. If the latter, what has constructed the survival mechanism prior to God’s manifestation? Who or what created the universe and put such potentials as an “evolving God” (not to mention mind) into it? Teilhard had to equivocate about these questions. Like other process theologians, he was mostly, but not entirely, committed to the idea that the “process God” was The God. This either-or bias, derived from process philosophy, has colored all of process theology.

What does the UB say about this? The Process God, who the UB calls “The Supreme” is the manifestation of The God in timespace. The God is existential and eternal. It is this God, The “Father Infinite”, along with two co-eternal coordinates, The Son and The Spirit whom we will meet again below, who has set up all the mechanisms underlying the spiritual, mindal, and physical ontology of the universe. That God, The Father, is not, presently, manifest personally in timespace. The Supreme is to become that manifestation. The Supreme becomes “fully manifest”, recognizable to all timespace persons, possessing within the limitations of time the powers God the Father would manifest if personally present in time, when all the persons in the timespace universe freely will to do the existential God’s will, to love one another.

THE PEOPLES OF THE UNIVERSE

To flesh this out a bit, a short digression into a broad brush description of the “who” mentioned above. Who are “all the persons in the timespace universe”? There are two broad categories. The first, descendant persons, are those created directly by the Gods (the Father, Son, or Spirit, singularly or in any combination). Really there are two broad levels of descending personalities (more on this below) but for now, we can consider both classes together. They have their divine origin in common. There are trillions upon trillions of such persons serving in the physical universes. These beings are not material. We cannot, in our present estate, see or otherwise detect them. But they do live and work (whatever constitutes their work) on physical worlds. “Physical worlds” in the UB include more than the evolutionary sorts of planets with which we are familiar. They include also what the UB calls “architectural spheres”, purpose-built worlds.

Among the duties, by no means exclusively, of this vast descendant host, is the shepherding, the teaching, of the second great group, the ascendant beings from the status of biological creatures to “perfected ascenders”. The evolution of biological creatures whose minds are sensitive to the values (again see “What are Truth, Beauty, and Goodness”) are always persons, and they can, potentially, know God and do their best to freely do what they take (however imperfectly) to be his will. All of these evolved mortals have souls. This term, as used in the UB, has little resemblance with the term as used, to mean almost anything, by the philosophers of this planet theist or atheist (see “What is The Soul?”). Mortals on evolutionary worlds are born physical, biological, beings. During their relatively short lives they nurture a soul, something unknown to any direct experience of the creature, but which serves as what amounts to the life-boat with which we escape biological existence and become “ascendant mortals”. I will not get into more of the details here, see the aforementioned “Soul” article.

This group, ascendant mortals consists of everyone who has died (mostly, there are a few timing details but they are not important over-all) on all the inhabited worlds of space (a growing number as the universe evolves). The universe is, a gigantic school dedicated to perfecting these ascenders who begin on day one of their survival, no different in spiritual status than on the day they died. What follows is a multi-billion year education until individuals reach levels of spiritual attainment and perfection enabling them to stand before God the Father in direct person to person communion. The details are not so important to our concern in this paper. What is important is to recognize that there are trillions of worlds from which such ascenders have come now for a few billions of years, for we are not by far the oldest inhabited world in the universe. That means this ascendant group, from rank beginners to the most advanced students, exist in numbers measured in trillions of trillions.

Where do all these people live? On the “purpose-built worlds” mentioned above. There is a lot of discussion of this in the UB. The details are not particularly pertinent to process theology as such.

We have then, broadly three groups of beings of personal status in the universe. Descenders, ascenders who have ascended, and future-ascenders, beings who have not finished out their biological life on evolutionary worlds. To bring the finite physical world to completion, all of these beings, literally every single individual, must have dedicated himself or herself to the doing of the Father’s will and actually love one another. Now it so happens that all of the descendant personalities, with but the fewest of exceptions I address a little later, are already on board with the program. So are, as it turns out, the vast majority of the ascendant beings, the few exceptions restricted to some of those at the very beginning stages of their post-mortal education. Ninety-nine-point-nine-nine percent of all these beings are already “with the program”. All have freely dedicated their lives to the doing of God’s will. Who remain? We do, those yet living in their original biological form on the evolutionary worlds of space.

It is the material people living on the evolutionary worlds who are, mostly, holding up the program. I am being a bit facetious here, because the evolution of such grossly imperfect beings for the purpose of perfecting them is one of (not the only) the main purposes of the whole creation. As concerns the individuals born on such worlds, that perfecting process takes place in the long educational career following material death. But in order for the “God of Time” to become manifest the peoples of the material worlds must also, universally, get with the program. This means that in some generation, the living people of a given world must all choose, must freely will, to do God’s will and love one another. As good as this may seem, it isn’t enough. A world that achieves this status for a few years, even a few generations, can still revert. To become a “settled world” by universe standards, a culture of universal will-to-love must obtain, unbroken, for ten thousand planetary years!

Now to put the final point to the scope of this effort, consider two things. First, when humans first appear on evolutionary worlds, they live brutal lives for many thousands of years. Humanity on Earth may be about one million years old. We are by no means the oldest world in the universe, but nor are we the youngest. There are planets in all stages of their geophysical or biological evolution. But for the entire universe to be settled, for the God of Time to fully manifest, all these worlds must be finished. There will, in other words, come a time when no new unsettled planets exist and no new (yet to be inhabited) worlds emerge. This completion amounts to the fixation of moral intention. While many sorts of change in time continue (babies continue to be born on the worlds of space, stars and planets continue to change), change ceases as concerns the moral intention of every personality in the universe. In this one way, temporal change ceases throughout the timespace universe. This stasis is one of the pillars of the Supreme’s power.

A second thing to note is that this planet, our Earth, is an exception to the norm in that its culture remains only semi-civilized a million years after the evolution of the first persons. This unusual and very rare situation is the result of historical events going back two-hundred-thousand years in our history. These events have no direct bearing on the “process theology” story over-all (the requirement that all planets settle, including Earth, still stands), but because they so dramatically effect delay in this planet’s social evolution I will address them briefly later in the essay.

GOD THE SEVENFOLD

“The people of the universe” are the tips of the fingers of the Supreme, the God of time. It is through us (descendant and ascendant persons), that the Supreme interacts with the physical world. But behind the fingertips there are hands, arms, and a head. There is much more to process theology in the UB than the union of the noosphere, which is, however, its end point. All of these people are not just milling about. Those ascending are being guided, and those doing the guiding have been trained. They have functional roles related to the ascendant economy, the gigantic university and much else that goes on in parallel with it. Those roles include an extensive hierarchy of authority and jobs extending from, under normal circumstances, evolutionary worlds up to the Father. If this sounds, to Christian Theologians, vaguely like Arianism, it is. But like the mutually compatible reality of an existential and and evolving “God of Time”, in the UB, Triuneism (the Trinity) and parts of what the Arians asserted, are both true.

At top of this hierarchy is what might be analogous to the corporate board and the collection of senior management. The UB calls it “God the Sevenfold”. It is not a person, but it does consist of persons. The first three of these persons, the first three levels of God the Sevenfold, are God the Father, God the Son, and God the Spirit. All three are eternal, all three are infinite (the Father unqualifiedly, the Son and Spirit qualifiedly, see “Prolegomena to a Future Theology”). I should note that while these first three persons happen to be the three persons of the Trinity, they are not The Trinity in their role as part of God the Sevenfold, but rather three individuals. The UB’s view of the Trinity is more nuanced than Christianity’s. I include a note about it at the end of this essay as The Trinity as such is not directly a part of the process theology story.

The fourth level of God the Sevenfold is The Supreme himself. How is this possible? It is possible because the person of the Supreme is eternal, created by God the Father “from the beginning”. But he is not infinite and he is incomplete in his domain, the finite universe of time. Nevertheless, he is already known as a person to the Father, Son, and Spirit, though he will not be knowable to the rest of us until the finite universe has achieved its endpoint.

From this midpoint, the seven-fold hierarchy continues into timespace. Level five are the Master Spirits. There are seven of them, one for each super-universe. They are responsible for the presence, in time, of Cosmic Mind (see “From What Comes Mind?”). I will not have more to say about them here. I have not spoken of super-universes, nor local-universes. The relation here between the UB’s description of what constitutes the “universes of time” is quite problematic and the subject of a future paper. I shall leave this subject alone, except to say that super-universes are very big places each divided into one hundred thousand local-universes I address below.

The “Ancients of Days” are level six. There are three in each super-universe, so twenty-one total. They are the top of the administrative arm of the Super-universes. Think of them as a trio of very large division managers in a large corporation consisting of many divisions. If this all begins to seem like a giant bureaucracy, that is exactly what the UB describes and the Arian Heresy envisioned! But pause to consider this is an idealized bureaucracy! Remember that virtually all of the descendant persons (exceptions addressed below) and also the ascendant persons-in-training are all, already, with God’s program and there is no limitation here on training, nor lack of motivation in any role. Each, from the highest to the lowest, functions in their role with virtual (certainly from our viewpoint) perfection.

The seventh and last layer of God the Sevenfold is the most important as concerns the God of Time and certainly for ourselves as we presently are. The UB calls these beings Creator Sons. There are seven-hundred-thousand of them, one for each local universe, and their existence represents the boldest insight of the Arian Heresy.

The Arians believed there was a hierarchy of being that added up to a God of time. Though they didn’t put it this way, they were proto-process theologians, and the UB affirms this insight with modifications. Among other things the Arians accepted an eternal existential Father, but not an eternal Son or Spirit. The Arians reasoned that if the Father “begot the Son and the Spirit”, these two persons could not be eternal because the begetting relation entails time. The UB denies this. What “entails time” is our thinking process. We are creatures fully soaked in time and cannot conceive of any “precedent relation” in a creation process that isn’t intrinsically temporal.

Although it is true to say that The Father begot the Son and together they begot the Spirit “…there never was a time when the I AM was not the Father of the Son and with him of the Spirit” [UB 0:3.16]. All three are fully eternal. Such eternal precedent relations, while not possible in the temporal realm, are possible (along with much more, see note on the Trinity following) at the Deity level. The Father, Son, and Spirit are all unqualifiedly eternal. They are also infinite, the Father unqualifiedly, the Son and Spirit each in one dimension.

The Son is the “first and infinite person”, personality being the sine qua non of spirit reality. The Spirit, the first conjoined thought of The Father and The Son, is infinite in mind. [Personality] “..is one thing which can be added to spirit, thus illustrating the primacy of the Father in relation to the Son. (Mind does not have to be added to spirit)” [UB 112:0.14]. Notice the beginning of a pattern here. The Father creates the Son and with the Son the Spirit. The whole of UB theology rests on shared power and responsibility from top to bottom.

Yet there was something correct about this Arian insight. An infinite eternal being cannot personally appear in the physical universe. There cannot be a past-eternal-infinity, even “for a time”, in the temporal-finite. “It is not possible for [the Eternal Son], an absolute being, to suspend consciousness of personality…” [UB 7:5.6]. One might add, as Jesus had to do by being born. Jesus, the God-man who lived on Earth is not past-eternal. He is a being created in time. Jesus is the Creator Son of our local universe. In case this diminution to the status of what amounts to a demi-God seems disappointing, the UB’s explication of the role of this class of Sons portrays them as far more powerful than most Biblical interpretations of Jesus’ life picture him. A local universe, when finished, consists of some ten million inhabited evolutionary worlds, and “To our universe and all its inhabited worlds the Sovereign Son is, to all practical intents and purposes, God” [UB 33:1.4].

LOCAL UNIVERSES, CREATOR SONS, AND HOLY SPIRITS

The super-universes are administered at various levels, the Ancients of Days, being but the top of the administrative chain. But the entirety of a super universe is composed of local universes in a way analogous to how the entire nation of the United States is composed of states. God The Father (in the UB telling, through the Spirit) sets the basic conditions and physical laws (an over-simplification, but will do here). Once these conditions result in sufficient development (proto-galaxies, galactic clusters, and so on, the beginnings of large scale organization of the temporal realms), the Creator Sons are dispatched to deal with the details. “…the local universes are the real laboratories in which are worked out the mind experiments, … divinity unfoldings, and personality progressions which when cosmically totaled, constitute the actual foundation upon which the Supreme is achireving deity evolution in and by experience” [UB 116:4.7]. This includes not only the physical details of their respective realms, but also the creation of a second set, a local universe set, of descendant personalities, and ultimately also the evolution (yes evolution) of bio-physical beings on evolutionary worlds leading to the appearance of brains (and therefore minds) able to recognize Spirit through the values (see “What are Truth, Beauty, and Goodness?”) and thereby worthy of personality status bestowed directly by The Father (see “Why Personality?”).

There is also a reflection at the local universe level of the relationship between the three infinite deities and God The Supreme. The Creator Sons are children of both the Infinite Father and the Eternal Son. The Infinite Spirit also is involved. Each Creator Son is paired with a companion created by the Spirit, a local universe child of the Spirit who is, like the Son, a person the book calls “The Holy Spirit”. There are a few interesting parallels here. The Creator son is an individual person. He is not infinite and he is a time-constrained being. While he isn’t physical (except in special circumstances I come to below), he cannot be in two places at once. By contrast the Holy Spirit is everywhere in her local universe at the same time. The geographic extent of her presence is the local universe, and outside her boundary is another, other, local universe, the domain of another Holy Spirit.

Further, while the Holy Spirit is a person, until certain milestones in the evolution of a local universe are reached, only the Creator Son recognizes her as a person, parallel to the way in which the original three Deity persons alone know the person of the Supreme prior to the completion of the timespace realms. As it turns out, in our local universe, the one the UB calls “Nebadon”, those milestones have been reached. Since all of this process bears directly on the eventual completion of the Supreme I must briefly review it.

As the three Infinite Deities both singly and in any combination create various super-universe descending orders, the Creator Sons and their consorts (singly and together) create local universe orders of being. I return to these in a moment. Through the earlier stages of local universe evolution a Creator Son rules that universe only as a proxy for the Infinite Father. The Son must earn full sovereignty of his own universe, and he does this by bestowing himself on, literally becoming one of, the various orders of being he and the Holy Spirit have created (like the TV show “Undercover Boss”). There are always seven such bestowals, each one illustrating some aspect of the relationship between the three Infinite Deities (distinctions we cannot recognize in our present estate). The bestowals begin illustrating the Father-Son-Spirit combination, then successively, the Son-Spirit, Father-Spirit, Father-Son, Spirit, Son, and lastly, on the lowest order of all, ascendant humans on an evolutionary world, the Father himself! That bestowal, the seventh of the Creator Son of our local universe was on Earth, the bestowal of Jesus. The bestowal rules require the Son to live “the full life of the creature”. If, as it does on an evolutionary world, that entails both birth and death, the Son must go through those too.

“Joshua ben Joseph [Jesus], the Jewish baby, was conceived and was born into the world just as all other babies before and since except that this particular baby was the incarnation of Michael of Nebadon, a divine son … and the creator of all this local universe of things and beings” [UB 119:7.5]. How does the Creator Son manage to be born a fully human baby and yet be the person of the Creator Son of the local universe? The book tells us that this is a mystery none know other than the Father, Infinite Son, and those that go through it, the Creator Sons themselves. But why, of nearly ten million inhabited worlds of the local universe, did our Creator Son choose Earth for the scene of his final bestowal? To explain that, I must sketch the administrative levels of the local universe.

There are three broad levels of local universe administration, the universe itself (think state government), the constellations (think county governments, one hundred give or take in every local universe), and the systems (think city government, one hundred give or take in each constellation). Each system administers roughly (eventually at completion) one thousand inhabited evolutionary worlds like Urantia (our world, Earth, hence the eponymous name of the book). The systems are the first level of contact between a world’s population and the “celestial administration”. It is to the system headquarters (a collection of “architectural worlds”) our souls are taken and awakened at some point (usually many years) after mortal death. The systems are also responsible for what is supposed to be routine, long term, contact with the early peoples of these worlds.

Sometime after the evolution of humans on a given world, the system headquarters sends a delegation to the planet, a revelatory mission. The delegation consists of a descendant being called a “planetary prince” and one hundred early-ascenders from other worlds in the system who volunteer for a long-term assignment to a newly populated (humans having evolved) planet. The planetary prince is not visible to the inhabitants of the planet, but the one-hundred ex-mortals are materialized (50 men, 50 women) as beings of that world, using the human genetics of the planet. Mortals of the world can interact with them, talk with them, learn from them. This mission began on Earth some 500,000 years ago, about 500,000 years after the first humans evolved on Earth (the UB definition of human has to do with the capacity of individual mind to sense the values, and not morphology as we must define it from our perspective). Caligastia was the name of our planetary prince. His boss, the system sovereign’s name was Lucifer, and our system (still) is named Satania after Satan, Lucifer’s ambassador to all the planetary prince missions on the system’s worlds.

The UB says that, in our local universe, there is an unusual degree of freedom accorded the administration of the systems. There is much rich detail in the UB about events that occurred some two-hundred-thousand years ago in the system of Satania, one of only three such events to ever occur in the local universe of 10,000 systems (three of these is a lot by UB standards). There is detail in the description of the administrative relation between the local universe and the systems. Of the inhabited planets in Satania (some number between six-hundred and a thousand), thirty seven of the Planetary Princes sided with Lucifer in what amounted to a revolt against the authority of the Creator Son. thirty seven out of at least 600, and this was the “worst” such rebellion (of three) in the local universe!

There is also considerable detail about how this rebellion, now two-hundred-thousand-years past affected the historical and social trajectory of the peoples of the Earth. I am not going to reprise those details here, but suffice it to say that this event, and a later, more recent (thirty-eight-thousand years) second failure related to the first, made Earth an exceptionally rare “double failure”. Both of these missions took place in what is now the middle east, the first somewhere now under the north end of the Persian Gulf, the second ended up (I blur many details) a few miles north between what are now, and were then, the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.

Importantly to our story, the double failure, especially the later one, had further and more profound impact on our history, making Earth one of, if not the, spiritually darkest worlds in the local universe. It is for this reason, that the Creator Son of this local universe, chose this world as the site of his final bestowal at the end of which he had completed the bestowal requirements and “all power on Earth and in heaven has been given to him”.

Jesus chose this world, the darkest of his universe, to exhibit the nature of The Father himself. That was the main mission. Everything else that happened, while important in its way, was (and remains) incidental to that mission. Did that mission fail? It seems that for subsequent generations on Earth it did, for there is still a great deal of confusion and “fake news” concerning the nature of the Father. But Christianity, nevertheless, managed to retain some part of Jesus teachings and life. The nature of the Father can be threaded out from the life of Jesus as portrayed in the New Testament, but it is a difficult task (see “Prolegomena to a Future Theology”). Meanwhile, humans on Earth were not the only audience. According to the UB, the entire (local universe) descendant hierarchy of beings, and all (local universe) ascendant post-mortal beings, were enthralled by the 33 year spectacle of Jesus’ Earth life. They all got the point, and it was for them, mainly and not us, that the universe-wide public bestowal was intended!

The UB’s historical story gets more detailed as it approaches the time of Jesus’ bestowal. For example among the rules of such bestowals (apparently) is that a Creator Son must appear among a people who believe in one God (even if not exactly “the Father” he came to illuminate). By two thousand years prior to the bestowal, the monotheistic idea on Earth (taught by both system-sponsored missions prior to their failure) had disappeared. How did a particular people become “the Jews” who satisfied (if less than ideally) that bestowal requirement? This is a fascinating story but not directly relevant to process theology. What is relevant is what happened when it ended. We return to the “God of Time”, the Supreme.

THE ALMIGHTY SUPREME

Why have I digressed in this, even over simplified, explication of Earth history? It answers the question “why Earth”, both explaining why this planet is so atypically evil, and why, for that very reason, Jesus chose this world. But regardless of his choice, the completion of his bestowal on Earth changed his status, allowing him to assume the rule of his local universe “in his own name”. This, in turn, fits into place, a piece of the puzzle that is the power of the God of Time to whom I now return.

The God of Time, the Supreme, is the fourth level of God the Sevenfold, its center. The being of the Supreme, his person, is existential, supplied by the first three levels, the Father, Son, and Spirit. The last three levels, the Master Spirits, Ancients of Days, and the Creator Sons represent the skeleton, and in the case of the Creator Sons also much of the muscle, the power potential, of the Supreme’s capacity to act.

If we (humans and ascendant humans along with all the descendant hosts) are the fingers of the Supreme, the Creator Sons are the hands which make the fingers possible. Completing his bestowal requirements does not complete in the sense of “fully settle” the local universe. Ultimately, that is the task of all its inhabitants, including us. But the Creator Son’s bestowals, all of them but in particular the last illuminating “The Father Himself”, sets a pattern in the local universe, foreshadowing the outcome. When once the person of the Supreme comes together with a timespace universe of beings all dedicated to the doing of the Father’s will, the person now known only to the three Deities becomes the “Almighty Supreme”, the personal manifestation of God the Father in and to the finite.

To the point of Jesus’ baptism in the Jordan, the beginning of his public ministry, Jesus lived his life in virtually perfect connection with and understanding of the nature of God’s will — its love-directedness. But this was a purely human life. Prior to his baptism, Jesus’ awareness of his Father was no different from that which any human being could, in potential, achieve. In any given circumstances Jesus had to figure out what God’s will might be, how God himself might express love, and how best to apply it to the given situation. This almost always amounts to finding some compromise between an ideal of action, and what might actually be done (by some particular individual) faced with a real decision.

It is this standard (and not what followed after that baptism when Jesus’ being the Creator Son was fully revealed to him), this ever-present connection to figuring out how best to do God’s will on Earth (and in the rest of the universe career) we must all achieve. As Jesus grew from childhood to adulthood he became the consummate master of this process. In one short life he grew from “best ever for a kid”, to “best there ever was expressed on Earth” and for that matter in the entire local universe! None of the rest of us, indeed not even immortal descendant beings, are expected to achieve this mastery in a few decades, and for us not even in a one-hundred year human lifetime. We are, however, expected to make progress. For ordinary humans progress means being better at “doing good” (both in discernment of opportunity and the act) this year compared to last. Such progress, at least in the present life, does not entail any particular intellectual religious beliefs, or for that matter any belief in God at all (see “What is the Soul?”).

The Supreme’s power to act depends on the dedication (freely doing the Father’s will) of his actor-agents, literally every personal being in the inhabited universe, to being “agents of the Supreme”. It also depends, as with anything else we or any person might do, on the skill of the actor. The actor’s skill, in turn, develops with practice (literally trying, “doing one’s best” to discern God’s will in a given situation and act constructively to express it). Skill also improves when appropriately motivated students are taught by a master, literally shown what such an ideal of discernment and action might look like.

By living a life dedicated to the doing of God’s will on this darkest of worlds, Jesus delivered a demonstration like no other (perhaps very few others) ever delivered in all the inhabited universes of space. Literally trillions of beings were apprised of what it means for a life to be dedicated to God’s will even under the most trying of circumstances. Although Jesus’ final bestowal did not complete his universe (in the sense of settling it) it did enhance both the dedication and skills of all beings (see note on “advanced worlds” below) inhabiting it. When a single human (or other) being makes that dedication for herself the Supreme grows by one more fingertip. When Jesus finished his bestowal, the Supreme’s power grew by trillions of fingertips.

The God of time as envisioned by human theologians emerges out of the the homogeneous union of earthly minds. This idea does parallel the UB in that nothing short of universal (on Earth) achievement as concerns the desire to do God’s will will do to finish the job. Human process theology is not clear about the existence of an existential infinite metaphysically underlying this process. Only the humans of the Earth (with few exceptions) are accorded a role in this process, and there is also vagueness about the role of those who have passed on (even from the Earth).

By contrast, in the UB, The Supreme fits into a structure of support that makes him and his eventual unification His origin grounded by the Father, Son, and Spirit, while supported, his proxy power, by the Master Spirits, the Ancients of Days, the Creator Sons, and all the persons of the inhabited universes who are already on board with the program. Within this structure, the Supreme eventually becomes the manifestation of the perfect existential Father as far as this is possible from within time. But while much of his supporting power is already operational, the Supreme cannot personally act in his own name as that manifestation as long as there are persons remaining in the time domain who are not yet with the program. A perfect representation of God in time cannot exist until the universe itself has reached a certain fixed state. Not perfection in all phases and certainly not absence of further change except for one change. No one in the finite universe ever again rejects the program!

What happens to free will? In effect nothing. There are still choices to be made, decisions and “courses of action” to take, learning goes on, and eventually a new class of ascenders (see below) to help shepherd on their way to perfection. There is still error (ascending mortals are not yet perfect in all phases as they become at the apex of their personal careers). If error is possible, then potential evil remains real (see “Theodicy in the Urantia Book”). But while the potential remains, there is no actual evil. Persons can still, theoretically, commit error deliberately (actual evil) but it would never occur to anyone to do so.

How then can this work? Imagine Earth is literally the last planet in the inhabited universe on which every living decision-capable person (not demented or too young) has not decided to try, always, to do the will of God. Imagine there is only one such person on the whole world. At some point, that person changes his mind, and freely decides, after all, that he does want to do God’s will. Does the Supreme suddenly pop into the universe and become manifest to all where before he was manifest to none but the Father, Son, and Spirit? Suppose further that a day, or a year, from this time, a child is born who, upon growing to his age of choosing, freely decides that he does not wish to do God’s will. Does the Supreme’s action-presence (capacity to act and be known) in the universe vanish? Can the Supreme flicker in and out like this, depending on the whim of the last few holdouts in the universe?

The answer is surely no. Given the administrative structure from God the Seven Fold, and especially the Creator Sons, suggests the Supreme’s integration, his person and his capacity to act and interact with the beings from which his power emerges likely in the perfection of entire local universes. When an entire local universe is “settled” in this sense, I suspect the Supreme’s power, if not complete and integrated throughout all of the inhabited creation is effectively present throughout such a settled local universe, or would be had such an event taken place. The UB notes that no local universe in all the wide inhabited creation has yet completely settled, though the older ones are much farther along the path than the younger ones.

CONCLUSION

The UB moves us from a process God appearing out of a mystical unification of earthly minds to one who represents the completion of a multi-billion year project backed and founded by an existential God who projected the God of Time from before time was. The future power of this “manifestation of the Father” in timespace is supported by a hierarchy ranging from just “plain old spiritual folks” to the personalities of God the Sevenfold. The emergence of the Supreme the bringing together of his person, known to The Father from the beginning, and his capacity to act, a function of personality throughout the universe unified on the desire to do The Father’s will, is the completion, the fruition intended from the beginning, of the timespace domain. They are the same event.

So what happens at that point in time? For one thing persons, all persons in timespace recognize the person of the supreme. He becomes contactable. The UB says that many changes occur in the timespace realm, but says little about what they are. It does tell us that “…since all creature experiencing registers in, and is a part of, the Supreme, when all creatures attain the final level of finite existence, and after total universe development makes possible their attainment of God the Supreme as an actual divinity presence, then inherent in the fact of such contact, is contact with total experience” [UB 117:5.14]. Being a manifestation of the perfect Father in the then-perfected timespace universe, the Supreme would have to be omnipresent, omniscient, and omnipotent within the finite. The UB does not tell us if these qualities are constituted solely by our power to act in accord with the Father’s will (persons are everywhere, everything that can be known in the finite at that future time is known by someone), or if the person of the Supreme comes to exercise power of himself. I suspect, the answer is both.

Being creatures of time, the UB says that we cannot really comprehend anything beyond the level of the Supreme, meaning anything that is prior to or follows from timespace and his completion. At least not now in our present estate, and for that matter through our entire ascension career until, at graduation, we achieve the full measure of eternal spirituality. We can discover and comprehend the physics of the time universe because it is of timespace. We can know something of God The Father because he is represented in timespace, especially by the Creator Sons, but also by the values discriminated in human mind. In our present estate, we have no epistemological access to what lies beyond the Supreme, but such things can at least be named. As we live today in time, there is a domain the book calls the absonite which is “…characterized by things and beings without beginnings or endings and by the transcendence of time and space” [UB 0:1.12]. In that domain, as yet uninhabited, persons are not evolved as they are in time but “eventuated”. What does this mean? We cannot know, but are told that it is in this absonite, a domain tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of times larger than the finite, that the next phase of God’s manifestation to reality begins (has already begun) to take shape. What God the Supreme is to the finite, God the Ultimate is to the absonite. God is infinite. Process never ceases.

[Note on the Trinity] Like its process theology, the UB Trinity is an expanded version of the Christian version. In Christianity, the “three persons” are the Trinity and the Trinity is the three persons, end of story. In the UB, they come apart. As analogy, think of a small corporation with a three-member board: president, treasurer, secretary. These are three individuals who can act and interact in seven different ways that are, nevertheless, not the board of directors.

1. The president alone
2. The treasurer alone
3. The secretary alone
4. The presidenbt and the treasurer
5. The president and the secretary
6. The secretary and the treasurer
7. The president, secretary, and treasurer together.

One is tempted to say that the last, the seventh, is the board-of-directors, our trinity, but this is not so. All three, for example, might be attending a barbq and interact without being the board. Now from time to time, these three persons do come together in a metaphorically fused form as the board-of-directors. When this group, as the board, issues a policy statement, they are, metaphorically, speaking with “one voice”. The analogy stops here. At the human level, each of the seven individual combinations and the metaphorically “fused board” are all sequential. Only one of the seven possible individual interactions can take place at one time, and the same is true of the board speaking “as the corporation”.

The existential deities are infinite and eternal. To them, seen from our viewpoint, every possible relationship is both simultaneous and forever. Not only do the three persons relate in seven ways and act as the fused Trinity simultaneously, the three, as individuals or in any combination, can also interact with the Trinity! It is because of this that the Father, Son, and Spirit, but not the Trinity as such, can be the first three levels of God the Sevenfold. It is also another reason why Jesus of Nazareth cannot be the Eternal Son, second person of Deity. There cannot be a time at which the Son is not always in association with the Father, Spirit, and Trinity.

[Note on advanced worlds] As noted in the text, Earth suffered twin failures in the first two system-sponsored-missions to this planet. This is very rare. ninty-nine-point-nine-nine percent of evolutionary worlds suffer no such failures. Once a people has advanced far enough in their civilization (the criteria of this is political, social, and spiritual, not technological) there are literally places one can go on the world to meet and speak with the system representatives to the planet. Such beings, if they are not already materialized, can be made visible and audible to humans. Not only is individual communication possible, but events of the system, constellation, and local universe, analogous to news broadcasts, are available to the inhabitants. So it happens, that on some worlds, even the material mortals were enabled to follow the life of Jesus as he lived it out on this world.

Mental Cause

In several essays on the broad subject of free will I have said that there are three types of causation in our physical universe: micro-physical indeterminism, macro-physical determinism, and agent-volition, the last subjectively experienced as the willful exercise of one’s mind’s causal capacity, “mental cause”. I refer to what Aristotle called “efficient cause”, that is the immediate forerunner (or forerunners) of a particular event or outcome taken to mean “that which physically brings that particular event about.” Aristotle defined four types of causes, three of which could be said, sometimes, to have “mental” aspects. A simple example here, a fire in a fire-place, will serve to illustrate Aristotle’s distinctions.

1. The “material cause” of the fire is that out of which it could be made. Wood or paper might work. Water would not. There also has to be some oxygen (or other oxidizer) present and so on.

2. “Formal cause” has to do not with the fire’s material substrate but its shape. Not all arrangements of even qualified materials will successfully light. To make a nice fire place fire, the wood and paper have to be arranged in certain ways. Many but not all possible arrangements will serve.

3. “Efficient cause” is that which physically brings the fire about. It might be a lit match set to paper for example. When physics talks about causes, it is this they are talking about. Importantly, there can be chains of efficient causes. To set my wood pile alight with a match I must first strike the match and light it, then hold its flame under my paper kindling. That last step is commonly called also the “proximate cause” and it is mostly this that this essay is about.

4. Aristotle’s fourth cause, the “final cause” is the reason we have built and lit our fire. We want to get warm. Notice that this cause is only indirectly connected to our fire. Besides starting a fire we might get warm in other ways. We could do physical exercise or put on a coat. The entire set up of the fire from the material (wood and paper), its arrangement, to its ignition, are merely means to this end.

Under normal circumstances, we would always attribute “final cause”, to a desire, aim, or objective (purposeful intention) of the agent to get warm. If “mental cause” (of any sort) even exists, final causes would always, by definition, be mental. “Material causes” (that wood and paper in the presence of oxygen can burn) are not typically thought of as mental. Formal causes (the arrangement of the wood and paper in the fire place) might or might not be mental. The wood and paper in their pre-light configuration is not mental per-se, but the arrangement-design might or might not be. In the case of our fire place an agent is involved, but for example in a natural forest (arrangement of trees) ignited by lightening, it is not. As with formal cause, efficient cause might or might not involve mentality. In the case of our fire place, an agent lights the fire, but in the forest fire, lightening does the job.

Notice that from a third-party viewpoint, efficient (causal) agency remains always a physical object. What lights our fire place is a body with arms and hands that strike matches, and so on. There is no need to assume mental cause is real from an outside perspective. When we get to an inside perspective however the situation is quite different.

WHY DO WE NEED MENTAL CAUSE

What we need is some justification for believing mental cause exists, that it belongs in our ontology and “is real” by virtue of being one of the causes (somewhere in the chain of efficient cause) of [some] physical event. When we observe what we take to be a minded agent (human or animal) we see that the physical effects they engender are always products of a body’s motion. No one disputes the physical connection between the body and the rest of the world. The issue comes down to “what moved the body”? The answer is muscles of course, nerves, and more nerves comprising some part of the brain. The question is, was there something that isn’t a nerve as such (though a nerve would be involved) but something quintessentially mental, perhaps a desire or something like that lying at the beginning of the chain of efficient-causes?

Most people would say that it “seems as though” this is the case. Physics says this seeming must be an illusion because it discovers only two kinds of causes in the universe, the indeterminate and the determinate. To be sure, discovered here means measured. Physics detects, with physical instruments, only two types of causes. Speculation about mental cause goes back as far as the earliest recorded philosophy, but physics has never been able to detect it!

If however there is no mental cause when we seem so strongly to sense that there is, all sorts of philosophical problems arise. Mental cause is not the same as free will, but free will entails mental cause. Physics of course denies free will is real But if I am not warranted in believing my agency can be a cause, at least of my own body’s motion, how am I warranted in believing anything? Belief itself (causal or not) is a quintessential mental phenomenon. If my causal capacity is an illusion why not also my agency, and why not anything I might happen to believe or desire?

We can be deluded about our beliefs being true, but it is difficult to believe we are deluded about having beliefs, and doubly so for desires. The debate isn’t usually about having (subjectively experiencing) beliefs, but rather about their being anything “over and above” brain states. If physics calls my very agency into question (not the illusion of it, but its being something more than brain states) what is it then that has beliefs and desires? Can “brains” be an answer? How do brains, qua brains, come to have beliefs and desires? Do the mechanisms of a clock know the time of day in the sense that a human knows it when she looks at the clock? To deny brain states beneath (the foundation) of our mental states would in this day be absurd. The issue is always ultimately the ontological status of what appears, the subjective, as a result of their presence, and what (if any) downward causal powers the appearance has.

These sorts of issues are but the tip of the iceberg. If mental cause (and so by extension free will) is an illusion then a radical skepticism about everything would seem to be warranted. At the same time, even skepticism, since we must be skeptical of our very agency, is not warranted either. There is a long literature here, but as John Searle put it (The Construction of Social Reality [1995]) nothing about the human experience nor all of human history makes any sense without presupposing free will.

WHY IS MENTAL “EFFICIENT CAUSE” CONTROVERSIAL?

I have given some answer to this above: because physics cannot measure it. It would seem unproblematic to take for granted that physics doesn’t cover everything; it is, as the matter is put, incomplete. But the problem is more subtle than that. The two types of causes that physics can measure (strictly speaking physics cannot measure quantum phenomena directly, but only when these interact with the macroscopic world) have qualities, characteristics, that mental causes lack. These qualities are what explain in the sense of “reveal the mechanism for” physical causation. There is no mathematics in physics, no observation or experiment that would suggest that anything other than prior-physics can be a cause in physics. Even not-directly-observable quantum phenomena are readily observed via these same qualities when they interact with the macroscopic world. Purportedly “mental causes”, by contrast, do not appear to share these qualities. As a result, they cannot be observed from a third party viewpoint, and so no path exists to an explanation of the mechanism of their effect on physics.

Rather than accepting that some mysterious sort of cause that cannot be observed must be real, physicists and most philosophers instead move to strike “mental cause” from the list of causal possibilities in our universe. This is a philosophical move, an induction based on evidence from the only sort of detection or measurement instruments, physical instruments, that exist. The anti-physicalist might respond by claiming that while physical instruments can not in principle measure mental cause, subjective consciousness, literally our phenomenal arena detects them, and this arena is, after all, also a part of the universe along with everything else.

At this point we are thrown back upon the brain which is indisputably physical. We know that the movement of my arm is preceded by nerve impulses in my arm and brain that are themselves indisputably physical. If at the top of this chain of efficient cause there was a mental event that set the chain in motion it behooves the proponent of mental cause to say how, that is by what mechanism, the mental event effects (that is trigger) the first indisputably physical (nerve) process in the chain?

CHARACTERISTICS OF MATERIAL and MENTAL CAUSES

According to Phil Dowe (Physical Causation [2000]) material cause is all about transferring some [physically] conserved quantity momentum, mass-energy, or electric charge. If one billiard ball strikes another momentum is transferred from one to the other. This results in two other observations important in this context. First physical cause is temporal. Causes precede their effects. The transfer of a conserved quantity cannot take place faster than the speed of light. Second, there is a reciprocal impact of the effect on the cause. If one billiard ball gains momentum, the other loses it.

Both of these qualities are absent from mental cause. In this context, distinctions made by Nicholas Rescher (“Free Will: A Philosophical Reappraisal” [2008]) will be helpful. Rescher is aware of the overall relation between consciousness (including mental cause) and brain states. He claims that there never can be any instance of mental cause without the simultaneous existence of some correlated brain state. If we look for a mental event that brings about a brain state, but isn’t itself associated simultaneously with some other brain state, we will never find it. “Mental causes”, in Rescher’s terms are not causes in Dowe’s physical sense.

Mental causes are not, in Rescher’s view, temporal. They are literally (metaphysically) simultaneous with their effect, some brain state. He distinguishes this sort of a temporal cause by calling it “initiation”. Initiation (often intentional but not necessarily so) need not evoke a neurological correlate ex nihilo. It need only slightly modify an existing state. From a third party viewpoint, that modified state would appear a perfectly natural evolution from its own prior state. Nothing would be found to suggest that anything non-physical was responsible for it.

This “a temporal initiation” is possible because in mental cause, no conserved quantity is transferred, and consequently there is no reciprocity. If I elect to pick up a rock and throw it at a window, I can feel the momentum transfer between my arm and the rock, and of course the throw is temporal. But the initiation of the event was simultaneous with the physical brain state that lies at the top of the physically [efficient] causal chain. The evidence that this is so is our experience that there is no reciprocal effect of my choice to initiate a rock-throw back on that initiator. Nothing about the initiation impacts back on the mental cause itself. Of course I may, this being a directed (intentional) initiation, immediately regret having done so. But that is a different, subsequent, thought, not a modification of the original one.

If Rescher is correct about initiation, how can we tell if the choice (mental cause) results (simultaneity being granted) in a correlated brain state or the other way around? We cannot tell based on any physical measurement. Physicalists would say there is no reason not to suppose that the physical is logically (if not temporally) prior. But if Rescher is correct, what then of the mechanism problem?

With regard to mechanism, many speculations seem to orbit about some interaction at the quantum level. The a temporal nature of initiation coupled with a lack of conserved quantity transfer and so lack of reciprocity, are suggestive of quantum entanglement where, on some views (see Ruth Kastner “Understanding our Unseen Reality” [2015]), the same qualities (or lack of them) characterize quantum phenomena. Since we cannot measure quantum phenomena directly, as far as we know, prior to some manifestation in the macro world (the exchange of a conserved quantity) the same qualities as characterize “mental cause” (initiation) might characterize “quantum cause”. The most detailed speculation with regard to mind might be Henry Stapp’s (“Quantum Theory and Free Will [2017]) Quantum Zeno Effect (QZE), mind’s ability to hold or otherwise modify subtle quantum indeterminacy within the anatomical and physiological processes of the brain. True, even QZE does not say exactly how this power of the mental connects up to the physical, but in this case, neither side of the transaction can be directly measured and there are reasons to believe (see the aforementioned Kastner book) that quantum phenomena are also initiations in Rescher’s sense.

WHAT IS MENTAL CAUSE

Above I have looked at mental cause from the physical side. What does it look like from the mental side? Some philosophers have characterized mental cause in terms of beliefs or desires. But beliefs and desires are not mental causes in Aristotle’s efficient sense. They are Aristotelian “final causes” and clearly mental, but not our issue here. Being a reason is of course mental, but not all of what is mental is also causal. I might want to get warm (my reason for lighting a fire) but not move a muscle to do anything about it. The quintessential efficient mental cause is a volitional act, an exercise of will on the part of a minded agent. In our experience, only mind, the subjective consciousness of an individual, has this ability to act volitionally, for a purpose, and not either indeterminate or determined by prior physics.

Purposeful cause is mental and only mental, and it is causal, that is itself determining of subsequent physics, for example my throwing a rock. As much as I disagree with Schopenhauer, I do believe he was correct in locating will and representation at the core of phenomenal experience, or as we would put these in more modern terms, intention and qualia. Mental cause, in particular our capacity to control intent and by extension a body, is an intrinsic component of our “what is it like to be…” experience.

Qualia are the mental effects of physical (brains) causes (an over simplification but for purposes of this essay I leave it at that, see “From What Comes Mind”). Intention is a mental cause (initiation) of a physical effect. Throwing a rock begins with an intention, but this is also true for subjective states that exhibit no gross physical effects. Suppose on a nature walk you come upon a beautiful flower. You attend to it, visually, perhaps also aromatically at the same time. Suddenly you become aware of a buzzing sound from behind or above your head somewhere. You cannot see what is causing the sound, but without moving your gaze from the flower you have become aware of it. Becoming aware is clearly a mental event which in this case may be comfortably attributed to prior physics (brain states, bearing in mind Rescher’s initiation can work in both directions). Only subsequently do we volitionally attend to the sound, perhaps to identify it. The volitional element entails agent purposeful-direction and so mental cause even if no muscle has moved.

Under normal circumstances, when we are conscious, we are never without both qualia and intention about something. Is it possible one can be conscious without intention, qualia, or both? Advanced Buddhist monks, masters at meditation, claim to achieve the first, but even this being so, they maintain this special state only while meditating. Sensory deprivation might suggest the possibility of a qualia-free consciousness, but people report made-up qualia, images and sounds brains generate (and to which we attend as we do in a dream state) in the absence of external stimulation. Perhaps we cannot be conscious in the absence of qualia.

MENTAL CAUSE AND FREE WILL

Mental cause is necessary but not sufficient for free will. In addition, free will demands agency, a subject whose will it is. An exercise of free willed choice is a volitional act of an agent. It is not either prior-determined, though often influenced, by physics, nor random. It is mental cause directed by agent-purposeful volition, itself quintessentially mental and unique to minded-agency in the universe. To get free will, mental cause must be real, and also subjective agency. The action of the body-agent of a physical event (throwing the rock) is willful only by extension from the [presumptive] mental-agent who is the initiator of that act. A body can sometimes act in the absence of agent consciousness. Such acts are not willful, and typically we do not claim that they are.

The connection between intention (willfulness) and subjective agency is built-in to human language. To speak of intention always implies subjective agency. So free will and mental cause are doubly linked. Free will rests on mental cause, but if free will is not real, there is nothing interesting left for mental cause to do. It is possible there are, for example, subconscious mental causes of which we are not aware (conscious of) and so not willed as such. But if in fact free will (not to mention agency as such) can be subsumed by brain states, there is no reason why subconscious mental cause could not be also.

An exercise of will (volition) by an agent is the quintessential “mental cause”. If free will is an illusion it is hard to understand the point of working to save mental cause. If all of our choices, our behaviors (including purely subjective sorts like “attending to”), are prior-determined by our brains what is left for mental cause to do? When Sean Carroll denies the possibility of free will because “If free will were real it would mean that mind causes physics” (The Big Picture [2016]) he is aiming, really, at mental cause. Free will goes along for the ride because it is the volitional exercise of the causal potential of mind that matters.

Agent volition then, and not beliefs or desires, is the epitome of mental cause. But if volition itself is prior-determined by brain states, and not a non-material (mental) agent, then there is no point to mental cause, the brain can do it all. In turn, mental cause, apart from the free will issue, is usually defended (or challenged) with reference to free will. The possibility of free will is grounded on the reality of mental cause and in addition the reality of the volitional agent able to utilize it. Both of these, in turn, rest on the reality of mind with the “power to cause physics”.

Cigar Review: Caldwell Long Live the King Mad MoFo

This vitola, a 5.75″ x 43 corona called the “Mad Mofo”. As usual these are above my budget these days, but occasionally a deal comes along (from $10+ to $8). Having smoked other sticks in Caldwell’s “kingly” line, I figured it would be good, so for a box of 10 I splurged. Not disappointed…

Wrapper: Corojo
Binder: Dominican
Filler: Dominican & Nicaraguan

Cold smnell: Mild barnyard, dirt, manure, some flowers. Not the strongest cold smell ever but lots of nice aromas in there.

Construction: A medium brown wrapper. A few cigars in the box had slight defects in the wrappers, a few places where they were slightly crushed. I suspect this was a problem in the packing of the box. Of the ten sticks, only two were like this and the defects are pretty small. You can see one of them near the cap in one of the pictures.

Otherwise, the wrapper is a little oily and toothy with visible small veins and seams. The pack is medium dense and even all the way along the cigar, but the whole looks rough. Not that this is a bad thing. Small veins are where the flavor is, and some of my favorite sticks have this sort of rough finish.

I’ve smoked 4 of these so far. Two had perfect draws all the way along, the other two were a little tough at the beginning, but loosened up in their second half. Smoke output varied with the draw, good but not great when the draw was tight, superb when it wasn’t. The burn line on these has been exceptional, even the few with tight draws. They smoke slowly giving me about an hour and twenty per stick.

Flavors: On first light, the cigar is woody with a cedar sweetness on the retrohale. No pepper at this stage. A few puffs in a little roasted almond makes an appearance followedG by a sweet flower (honeysuckle?) and leather come to play. All of this is very smooth. A third of the way in the pepper rises, but well balanced with all of those other flavors. I get some mint or wintergreen in here (the sweet flower again), and lots of sweet woods.

As the stick smokes the various flavors mix and trade places. One hit big on nut, the next on wood, sweet floral and leather make appearances as does something of a burnt nut. In the second half the tight sticks loosened up. Smoke output increases, the burn line is still straight. Pepper comes up gradually until by the end of the stick it is pretty much up front, but the other flavors are there all the way to the nub..

Other than a few mildly tight draws (I never had to use a tool to loosen them) the construction of these is great and the flavors superb! Strength a solid medium, maybe a little on the fuller side. Good stick!

Here’s a review from The Busted Wallet, and another, a video review, from Cigar Obsession.

Ruminations

"And a woman is only a woman but a good cigar is a smoke" Kipling. "The Betrothed"