Science Quote by Richard Dawkins

Dawkins swings a scalpel here, not a sledgehammer. The tight repetition of "What has... ever...?" is courtroom cross-examination: he’s not inviting theology to defend itself, he’s putting it on the back foot and daring it to produce admissible evidence. The scare quotes around "theology" do most of the ideological work. They signal that the word is on trial - not merely for bad answers, but for being a category mistake, a label that smuggles legitimacy into the room.

The intent is aggressively demarcationist: to redraw the border between knowledge and tradition in a way that flatters scientific method as the only serious route to truth. Notice the traps he sets. "Demonstrably true" is a scientific standard; "not obvious" dismisses whatever moral or existential insights theology might claim by branding them either unprovable or banal. It’s a two-door exit: if theology can’t be tested, it’s useless; if it can be intuited, it’s redundant.

Subtext: theology is not just wrong, it’s intellectually parasitic - a discipline that survives by reframing mysteries as expertise. That rhetorical move fits Dawkins’s broader project in the post-9/11, New Atheist moment, when religion was increasingly discussed as a public force with political consequences, not merely private comfort. He’s also speaking to an academic culture where theology still holds institutional space; by asking whether it’s "a subject at all", he’s really challenging why universities, media, and public life continue to grant it the prestige of scholarship.