Philosopher · Modern
Charles Darwin
1809–1882 · Evolution by natural selection
Raised Anglican and once destined for orders; by the 1860s an agnostic who called eternal punishment “a damnable doctrine.”
Darwin's Origin of Species argued that species descend with modification from common ancestors through natural selection; The Descent of Man extended this to human bodily and mental faculties and to the moral sense, which he derived from social instincts. He was a cautious naturalist, not a polemicist, and left his religious doubts largely to his Autobiography.
Why he matters: Humani Generis (1950, § 36) allows research into the evolution of the human body while reserving the soul's immediate creation; John Paul II (1996) called evolution “more than a hypothesis”; Newman wrote in 1868 that Darwin's theory “need not be atheistic”; the Catholic conversation with him continues in Thomistic evolution.
Where to be careful
The reduction of mind and the moral sense to evolved instinct denies the spiritual soul and the natural law (Lateran V; Humani Generis 36–37, which also rejects polygenism as then understood); his dismissal of design in detail sits against the Fifth Way and Dei Filius ch. 1 on providence.
Reading
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On the Origin of SpeciesCharles Darwin · Read the whole; it is better argued than its popularizers.
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AutobiographyCharles Darwin · His own account of the loss of faith.
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Thomistic Evolution: A Catholic Approach to Understanding Evolution in the Light of FaithNicanor Austriaco, OP, et al. · Where Catholic thought has reached.
Documented positions
Where this thinker stands on each dispute the test covers.