According to the Urantia Book, material planets suitable of sustaining material life forms come in to existence following an evolutionary development process running in to billions of years. Though the process is evolutionary, it is not automatic. The evolutionary process is initiated, supervised and controlled by invisible agencies of God, which might consist of innumerable invisible, immortal personalities, deriving their power and abilities from God.
The material life sustainable planets which are located in innumerable planetary systems more or less similar to our solar system are in trillions. We are not able to count them because they are all many many light years away from our earth. Moreover, none of these planets are luminaries such as our sun or the stars to be detected by our telescopes.
No two life sustaining material planets have the same features. But, the general pattern of progress of life and civilization in them could be similar.
Notwithstanding these many diversifications of planetary development along physical, intellectual, and social lines, all evolutionary spheres progress in certain well-defined directions.
Under the careful and periodical supervision of the agencies of God, the mortal races on an average world formed in time and space will successively pass through the following seven developmental epochs [stages of time period]:
1. The nutrition epoch. The pre-human creatures and the dawn races of primitive man are chiefly concerned with food problems. These evolving beings spend their waking hours either in seeking food or in fighting, offensively or defensively. The food quest is paramount in the minds of these early ancestors of subsequent civilization.
2. The security age. Just as soon as the primitive hunter can spare any time from the search for food, he turns this leisure to augmenting his security. More and more attention is devoted to the technique of war. Homes are fortified, and the clans are solidified by mutual fear and by the inculcation of hate for foreign groups. Self-preservation is a pursuit which always follows self-maintenance.
3. The material-comfort era. After food problems have been partially solved and some degree of security has been attained, the additional leisure is utilized to promote personal comfort. Luxury vies with necessity in occupying the center of the stage of human activities. Such an age is all too often characterized by tyranny, intolerance, gluttony, and drunkenness. The weaker elements of the races incline towards excesses and brutality. Gradually these pleasure-seeking weaklings are subjugated by the more strong and truth-loving elements of the advancing civilization.
4. The period with quest for knowledge and wisdom. Food, security, pleasure, and leisure provide the foundation for the development of culture and the spread of knowledge. The effort to execute knowledge results in wisdom, and when a culture has learned how to profit and improve by experience, civilization has really arrived. Food, security, and material comfort still dominate society, but many forward-looking individuals are hungering for knowledge and thirsting for wisdom. Every child is provided an opportunity to learn by doing; education is the watchword of these ages.
5. The epoch of philosophy and brotherhood. When mortals learn to think and begin to profit by experience, they become philosophical -- they start out to reason within themselves and to exercise discriminative judgment. The society of this age becomes ethical, and the mortals of such an era are truly becoming moral beings. Wise moral beings are capable of establishing human brotherhood on such a progressing world. Ethical and moral beings can learn how to live in accordance with the golden rule.
6. The age of spiritual striving. When evolving mortals have passed through the physical, intellectual, and social stages of development, sooner or later they attain those levels of personal insight which impel them to seek for spiritual satisfactions and cosmic understandings. Religion is completing the ascent from the emotional domains of fear and superstition to the high levels of cosmic wisdom and personal spiritual experience. Education aspires to the attainment of meanings, and culture grasps at cosmic relationships and true values. Such evolving mortals are genuinely cultured, truly educated, and exquisitely God-knowing.
7. The era of light and life. This is the flowering of the successive ages of physical security, intellectual expansion, social culture, and spiritual achievement. These human accomplishments are now blended, associated, and co-ordinated in cosmic unity and unselfish service. Within the limitations of finite nature and material abilities, there are no bounds set upon the possibilities of evolutionary attainment by the advancing generations who successively live upon these supernal and settled worlds of time and space.
The seventh stage is the highest level of civilization and material progress that a world like earth can achieve. The authors of the above book says that at this era, humans would satisfactorily advance in the knowledge of science, medicine and other such aspects that the average life span becomes around 500 years. Moreover, the spiritual knowledge level during this time would be so high that people no longer would be afraid of material death (because, they are confident with the knowledge of life even after their material life ends on their material world!)
Now what would you think about the stage of our earth now?
[See and read from the scan of the originally printed Urantia Book here!]
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