Science Quote by Richard Dawkins

Dawkins is doing what he does best: stripping religion of its self-description and redescribing it in the cold vocabulary of mechanics. The line is engineered to feel less like an argument than an X-ray. “Untested belief” isn’t just “faith”; it’s a hypothesis that never submits to the lab. “Unshakable truth” isn’t wisdom; it’s a hardened end-state, belief calcified into certainty. The real engine of the sentence, though, is the middle: “through the power of institutions and the passage of time.” That’s the indictment. Religion, in this framing, doesn’t win because it’s true; it wins because it’s good at reproducing itself.

The intent is plainly polemical: to relocate the authority of religion from revelation to sociology. Dawkins is not debating God so much as explaining how God-talk becomes socially durable. Institutions do the heavy lifting: churches, schools, rituals, texts, prestige economies. They manufacture trust, police doubt, and reward conformity. Time does the rest, laundering origin stories into heritage. Repetition becomes evidence. Longevity becomes legitimacy. The oldest idea in the room starts to feel like the most self-evident.

Subtext: “unshakable truth” is a warning label, not a compliment. Certainty is treated as a product, not a virtue. There’s a modern anxiety underneath it about inherited narratives in general: the way any system can convert “we’ve always done it this way” into “it must be right.”

Context matters, too. Dawkins speaks from a late-20th/early-21st-century moment when science is a cultural authority and religion is increasingly framed as a competing epistemology. The quote is designed for that fault line, where the debate isn’t only about belief, but about who gets to define what counts as knowledge.