Forbidden Archeology_ The Full Unabridged Edition - Michael A. Cremo [337]
It is significant that for Andrew Carnegie and others like him, the impulse to charity, traditionally directed toward social welfare, religion, hospitals, and general education, was now being channeled into scientific research, laboratories, and observatories. This reflected the dominant position that science and its world view, including evolution, were coming to occupy in society, particularly within the minds of its wealthiest and most influential members, many of whom saw science as the best hope for human progress.
John c. Merriam, president of the carnegie institution, believed that science had “contributed very largely to the building of basic philosophies and beliefs” (1938, p. 2531), and his support for von Koenigswald’s fossil-hunting expeditions in Java should be seen in this context. A foundation like the carnegie Institution had the means to use science to influence philosophy and belief by selectively funding certain areas of research and publicizing the results. “The number of matters which might be investigated is infinite,” wrote Merriam (1938, p. 2507). “But it is expedient in each period to consider what questions may have largest use in furtherance of knowledge for the benefit to mankind at that particular time.”
The question of human evolution satisfied this requirement. “Having spent a considerable part of my life in advancing studies on the history of life,” said Merriam (1938, p. 2529), “i have been thoroughly saturated with the idea that evolution, or the principle of continuing growth and development, constitutes one of the most important truths obtained from all knowledge.”
By training a paleontologist, Merriam was also by faith a christian. But his Christianity definitely took a back seat to his science. “My first contact with science,” Merriam (1938, pp. 2041–2042) recalled in a 1931 speech, “was when i came home from grammar school to report to my mother that the teacher had talked to us for fifteen minutes about the idea that the days of creation described in Genesis were long periods of creation and not the days of twenty-four hours. My mother and i held a consultation—she being a Scotch presbyterian— and agreed that this was rank heresy. But a seed had been sown. i have been backing away from that position through subsequent decades. I realize now that the elements of science, so far as creation is concerned, represent the uncontaminated and unmodified record of what the Creator did.”
Having dispensed with scriptural accounts of creation, Merriam managed to turn darwinian evolution into a kind of religion. At a convocation address at the George Washington University in 1924, Merriam (1938, p. 1956) said of evolution, “there is nothing contributing to the support of our lives in a spiritual sense that seems so clearly indispensable as that which makes us look forward to continuing growth or improvement.”
He held that science would give man the opportunity to take on a godlike role in guiding that future development. “Research is the means by which man will assist in his own further evolution,” said Merriam (1938, pp. 2541–2542) in a 1925 address to the carnegie institution’s Board of trustees. He went on to say: “i believe that if he [man] had open to him a choice between further evolution directed by some Being distant from us, which would merely carry him along with the current; or as an alternative could choose a situation in which that outside power would fix the laws and permit him to use them, man would say, ‘I prefer to assume some responsibility in this scheme.’”
“According to the ancient story,” Merriam continued, “man was driven from the Garden of eden lest he might learn too much; he was banished so that