Charles Darwin
Living things are explained by natural selection, without a prior plan.
Life
Charles Darwin (1809-1882), an English naturalist, sailed on the Beagle (1831-1836) and developed from it the theory of evolution by natural selection, published in 1859. His theory accounts for the appearance of design in living things without a designer and reshaped debates about God, the place of humans and the origin of morals. He described himself as perplexed on the question of God, and later as an agnostic.
Main works
Species descend from common ancestors and change through natural selection.
Applies evolution to humans, their moral faculties and sexual selection.
Gathers the evidence on variation and selection in domesticated species.
In his own words
« There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved. »
« I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent & omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidæ with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice. »
Positions
click a row to see the evidenceHe calls himself an agnostic: the origin of the universe and of mind is beyond human knowledge.
Darwin, Letter to John Fordyce (1879); Autobiography (1887)
Mental faculties differ from animals' in degree, not in kind; thought is a product of the brain.
Darwin, The Descent of Man (1871)
He takes the general good of the community as the standard of right action.
Darwin, The Descent of Man (1871)
The moral sense grows from social instincts and sympathy, shaped by natural selection: humans are neither simply good nor bad.
Darwin, The Descent of Man (1871)