Many different authors have been involved in producing the Urantia Papers, ranging from exalted beings such as a Divine Counselor to much more lowly beings such as secondary midwayers. The degree of freedom allocated to individual authors is indicated in the explanation given for the writing of the summary of Jesus’ teachings at Urmia. Here we are told (page 1486) that neither the seraphim of the churches nor the seraphim of progress agreed with this account as prepared by three secondary midwayers. Obviously the seraphim thought that the account was in error, and in view of their status relative to secondary midwayers, perhaps we would have expected their opinion to prevail. Nevertheless the summary was permitted to stand.
It may be advantageous to put ourselves in the place of an author given the responsibility to write one of the Urantia Papers. Imagine, for example, being a particle physicist having detailed and up to date (1990) knowledge of all advances in our field of expertise that have occurred since about 1930. Imagine now being transported back to 1930 and instructed to summarize the knowledge then prevailing in out field, but with the proviso that we must conform with the mandate given to the authors of the Urantia Papers. Since one of our instructions is that we must not reveal unearned knowledge, it follows that we cannot even imply that any current (1930) theory may be wrong since this too can be interpreted as conveying unearned knowledge. Imagine too that we must put our own interpretation on the requirements of the mandate, because that appears to be the case for The Urantia Book — different authors certainly appear to have been permitted to interpret the provisions of the mandate in different ways. It is only when we undertake such a task seriously that we even start to appreciate the difficulties faced by the authors of the Papers all of whom would have been aware of universe policy that we humans must find our own way to truth through personal experience.
Presumably the authors of papers that include scientific material were not restricted to the use of published work only — particularly as it was customary during the 1930’s for many quite famous scientists to consider that publication of their work was beneath their dignity. In that period, ideas were often circulated in letters between individuals and whole theories could be gradually built up without any individual having any real right to lay claim to authorship. Then, as now, lots of ideas were also conveyed in discussion at seminars or presented at meetings of various societies. There is no reason to believe that use of unpublished work would have been denied to the authors of the Urantia Papers.
An example of what might have occurred may be gleaned from the statement on p.464 about a major source of energy in stars and the catalytic role of carbon in the conversion in stars of hydrogen to helium. The scientific literature credits this discovery independently to two authors, one in the U.S.A. (Bethe) and the other in Germany (von Weizsacker) but their work was not published until 1939, four years after receipt of the relevant Urantia Paper. Did the author of the Paper provide us with unearned knowledge? The very fact that two geographically widely-separated authors published the same information at the same time may indicate that the discovery was ripe to be made, and that perhaps the general concept had been around for some time waiting for someone to put it together with the right pieces of evidence to be able to claim authorship of a published account. If this was the case, it could have been quite valid for the author of the Urantia Paper to class this material as earned knowledge. On the other hand it is possible that the information was included inadvertently, or else it was thought to come under the heading of transient clarification of knowledge as defined in the mandate of page 1110.
There are many instances of this kind of information becoming available in the Urantia Papers long before it became accepted by-the scientific community. Although some such cases may be a re-statement of unpublished material, there is much that does not appear to be in this category that would have to be considered as either an inadvertent disclosure or else coming into the category of information that transiently clarifies knowledge as per the mandate.
Urantia Evidence 