This year (2009) marks the two-hundredth anniversary of the birth of Charles Robert Darwin and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his ground-breaking work On the Origin of Species. This course aims to introduce you to the ideas contained within Darwin’s two major works, Origin and The Descent of Man while viewing those ideas within their historical context. After providing some background to Darwin’s life, we will examine the British tradition of natural theology and see how David Hume problematized any concrete claims about divine design in nature. This will lead us to examine Darwin’s explanation for the design-like appearance of organism, his theory of descent with modification through natural selection. We will then explore how he used this idea to explain, among other things, human morality. This project to secularize the study of nature met opposition and support from both scientists & philosophers in his day; we will examine these reactions and see how Darwin’s ideas were sufficiently powerfully to “suit anyone who had an axe to grind” (as George Bernard Shaw noted). Within America in particular, opposition has also come from religious believers who equate acceptance of evolution with amorality (and often immorality). We will examine the history of this opposition and will end by asking whether Darwin’s ideas – and evolutionary theory in general – can tell us anything about morality.

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• David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion
• Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species
• ---, The Descent of Man
• Michael Ruse, Taking Darwin Seriously
• William Paley, Natural Theology