Science Quote by Richard Dawkins

Dawkins gives God a backhanded compliment: not a supernatural being, but a ruthlessly successful piece of cultural software. The line works because it steals the language of faith ("exists") and reroutes it through evolutionary accounting. Existence becomes a matter of replication, not revelation. If an idea can persist, mutate, and spread across generations, it earns a kind of reality in the only arena Dawkins cares to grant it: the measurable world of effects.

The slyness is in the conditional: "if only". He concedes nothing metaphysical, yet he refuses to treat religion as a mere mistake that should have died out once people learned better. Instead, he frames belief as adaptive at the level of culture, a "meme" with "high survival value" - a unit of transmission that can outcompete rivals by offering psychological comfort, social cohesion, moral enforcement, or narrative explanation. The subtext is almost more cutting than atheism: God doesn't need to be true to win; God needs to be contagious.

Context matters. Dawkins popularized "memes" in The Selfish Gene (1976) to extend Darwinian thinking beyond biology. Here, he’s also taking aim at a common rhetorical move in religion: equating longevity with legitimacy. If billions believe, the implication goes, there must be something there. Dawkins flips that: mass belief is exactly what you'd expect from a well-engineered replicator, especially in the "environment provided by human culture" - a habitat built for stories, authority, ritual, and identity. It’s not an argument against God so much as a demystification of why God keeps showing up, even when the evidence doesn’t.