Success Quote by Graham Greene

Greene slips a razor blade into a velvet glove: he grants God the opening credit, then immediately demotes Him to an anxious tinkerer running a workshop full of discarded drafts. The line’s punch is the phrase “in case,” which turns omnipotence into contingency. A deity who needs backups is less Genesis and more product development, and “prototypes” is doing wicked work here: it drags the sacred into the language of engineering and mass manufacture, where failure is assumed, iteration is normal, and nothing is final.

The subtext isn’t simple atheism; it’s Greene’s characteristic Catholic unease. He’s fascinated by belief under pressure, by institutions that promise certainty while human experience keeps reporting chaos. This quip preserves the emotional architecture of faith (there is a Creator) while conceding the stubborn evidence of a world built on trial, error, and waste. Evolution becomes not a rival explanation but a theological loophole: if God looks inconsistent, that’s just R&D.

Context matters because Greene wrote in a century when Darwin had long since won the scientific argument, yet religious authority still claimed cultural primacy. His move is to reframe the conflict as a matter of tone and power. If the Church insists on a flawless plan, Greene replies with a God who improvises. That’s both comic and unsettling: it offers believers a way to “accept” evolution, but only by accepting a messier, less comforting divinity. The joke lands because it exposes what people often want from religion - not creation as a process, but creation as reassurance.