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In The Selfish Gene (1976), Richard Dawkins suggested the concept of the meme, an idea that propagates itself by being passed from brain to brain by imitation, in analogous fashion to the gene, which propagates itself by being passed from body to body via procreation. Memes are the cultural counterparts of genes.
Many materialist evolutionists, including Dawkins himself, think of religions as memes, ideas that infect our brains. Belief in God, according to this view, is a meme that has successfully propagated because it has survival value for those who accept the belief—but that doesn’t means it’s true. It’s just useful for spreading belief.
Oxford theologian and former atheist Alister McGrath reports that most anthropologists and scientists think there’s no such thing.
First, the meme is just a hypothesis, and one that we don’t need because there are better models available in, for example, economics and anthropology. If genes could not be seen, we would have to invent them — the evidence demands a biologically transmitted genetic replicator. Memes can’t be observed, but the evidence can be explained perfectly well without them.
Darwinizing Culture by Robert Aunger contains a quote from Maurice Bloch, a professor of anthropology at London School of Economics, that sums it up best: the “exasperated reaction of many anthropologists to the general idea of memes” reflects the apparent ignorance of the proponents of the meme hypothesis about the discipline of anthropology and its major successes in explaining cultural development without feeling the need to develop anything like the idea of a meme at all.
At this stage, the issue is simply whether memes exist, irrespective of their implications for religion.
I say, and most active scientists say with me, that there is no evidence for these things. As Simon Conway Morris writes in his book Life’s Solution, memes seem to have no place in serious scientific reflection. “Memes are trivial, to be banished by simple mental exercises. In any wider context, they are hopelessly, if not hilariously, simplistic,” said Morris, a professor of evolutionary paleobiology at the University of Cambridge.
So, memes are hypothetical unobservable entities that are unnecessary to explain reality. How is that different from a purely imaginary entity? And isn’t that what materialists think of God: that he is a hypothetical entity that adds nothing to an account of reality.
Besides, if memes do exist, then atheism is a meme. So much for the conceit that atheists form their views solely on the basis of scientific evidence.
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