On 14 Nov Peter wrote: I thought for a moment, John, that you were about to support the concept, developed (and later withdrawn, I think) by Dawkins of ‘memes’, or cultural replicators which operate analogously (is that a word?) to genes.” I didn’t know Dawkins had disowned the meme idea, but if so there might be two understandable reasons why. First, the notion of ideas as viral self-replicators, transmitting themselves through voice and text from mind to mind, is a tough theory to test empirically, rendering it dubious by Dawkins’ own criteria.

Second, meme transmission is predicated on the possibility that cognitive content can appear in brains without people consciously thinking them. So, for example, you might find yourself humming some Madonna song without ever having been consciously aware that you’d heard the song. Unbidden and beneath conscious processing, the tune has emplanted itself in your mind.

Ideas arriving from outside the self and emplanting themselves in minds: doesn’t this leave open the possibility that God might communicate his thoughts and feelings directly into human minds? Are some minds more receptive, either congenitally or regeneratively, to “God-memes,” possessed of what Calvin called the “sensus divinitatis”? How likely is it that Dawkins never considered the theological possibilities of memes?