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mathematics are fields where a feeling for truth is ultra important. Truth has a smell all of its own. Mathematicians and physicists pluck truth out of the depths of their minds. Biochemists, though they may smell truth, have to work empirically--sift the data, make a hypothesis, do an experiment, improve the hypothesis, and so on and so on. It can be tedious stuff.
One of the truly great geniuses of our century was a mathematician named Kurt Godel. He "proved" that there is no set of computational rules that can characterize the properties of natural numbers. Put another way, it means that our number system cannot be shown to be self-consistent. Surely then our implicit trust in numbers is because they have the smell of truth.
Roger Penrose, another maths-physics genius of this century used the following illustration2 that indicates mind is something very special. Draw on a blackboard a variety of objects in groups such as two cups, five pencils, three knives, etc., set any number of computers in front of the blackboard, and switch them on. You can leave them there for weeks, months, even years and they will be quite unable to devise the set of natural numbers from any set of rules programmed into them--and certainly not from their own intuition. But show the same set to small children and most will abstract the concept of natural numbers, even though they had no prior training in mathematics!
It does not require genius class thinking to realize there is something very special about human minds. I'm quite sure that one of its specialties is the ability to intuitively feel truth. Of course it is possible to train and develop this gift. And the more accurate knowledge that we accumulate, the better equipped we ought to be to discern deeper and deeper truth.
We all have the gift for feeling truth--regardless of higher education and intellectual ability. I think many animals may have it in some more primitive way. Did you know that bees can count?5
Truth discernment is the gift we must use to help us evaluate the Urantia Papers. Clearing our minds from preconceived prejudices can be a great help.
It is true that life's circumstances may have preconditioned some people to be gullible when they first find The Urantia Book. Having been told that the Papers have celestial authors, and given some vivid propaganda about their revelatory status--perhaps accompanied by a need to make sense of their lives--some may then be ready to believe something that they feel will help to solve their personal problems. Time often makes such people very much more discerning, particularly as they develop their feel for truth.
For lots of us, our introduction to the Papers comes about in the absence of any apparent psychological need for a lifesaving prop. Perhaps we were voracious consumers of written material, or we may simply have been seekers after truth. Or perhaps some random combination of circumstances may have caused us to start browsing through them.
Whatever it is that starts our quest, we are quickly confronted with the fact that there are more than two thousand pages in The Urantia Book, most of them requiring attentive concentration in order to comprehend their meaning. So perhaps some external help may assist in the quest for truth.
In illustration that prior knowledge can be a help for comprehension of the Urantia Papers, let me point out that the mandate under which their authors had to work is not discussed in any depth until just past the half way point in the book. And the mandate was such as to ensure that the cosmology of the Papers would be quickly outdated.
It is easy to miss two important statements, one near the beginning, the other in the last third of the book, that inform us that human sources, about three thousand of them, have been used whenever these sources have described some concept or idea reasonably well.
Those who had to discover these points for themselves probably experienced much frustration in their journey of discovery. But my own experience has brought about a judgment that can be summarized in these terms: If these Papers are not true, then they ought to be true.
A very large number of Christians have, through the ages, arrived at concepts about God and about Jesus, his life and teachings, that are similar to those depicted in the Urantia Papers. But it usually takes a life-time of study and experience to reach that state. The Urantia Papers can greatly help anyone to simplify and shorten their journey. And that can occur regardless of any belief held about their authorship and revelatory status.
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