How "God" functioned in Socrates' life

As seen in a previous Nugget, Dawkins denounces "God" as an unnecessary hypothesis which functions to explain the origin and order of material reality. In antiquity this notion of God received very little attention. Instead, God was invoked to explain ultimate moral obligation or truth. Consider, for example, Socrates in the Apology, Plato's version of Socrates defense speech to the court that eventually convicted and executed him (399 B.C.) Socrates says things like this:

This is the truth of the matter, men of Athens: wherever a man has taken a position that he believes to be best, or has been placed by his commander, there he must I think remain and face danger, without a thought for death or anything else, rather than disgrace. It would have been a dreadful way to behave, men of Athens, if, at Potidaea, Amphipolis and Delium [major infantry battles in which Socrates served as a soldier], I had at the risk of death, like anyone else, remained at m post where those you had elected to command had ordered me, and then, when the god ordered me, as I thought and believed, to live the life of a philosopher, to examine myself and others, I had abandoned my post for fear of death or anything else. That would have been a dreadful thing, and then I might truly have justly been brought here for not believing that there are gods, disobeying the oracle, fearing death, and thinking I was wise when I was not. ... (28e, tr. Grube)

Or again,

Men of Athens, I am grateful and I am your friend, but I will obey the god rather than you, and as long as I draw breath and am able, I shall not cease to practice philosophy, to exhort you and in my usual way to point out to any of you whom I happen to meet: "Good Sir, you are an Athenian, a citizen of the greatest city with the greatest reputation for both wisdom and power; are you not ashamed of your eagerness to possess as much wealth, reputation and honors as possible, while you do not care for nor give thought to wisdom or truth, or the best possible state of your soul?" (29e)

I think, in other words, that Plato's Socrates would have found the God that Dawkins rejects a red herring--something that neither he nor any serious thinker in Greek tradition had ever proposed. Plato's primary concern was precisely non-physical phenomena (justice, goodness, truth), and when he used the word "God," he used it to probe and identify those transcendent phenomena. He was remarkably uninterested in explaining material phenomena. (I'm not unaware that in a couple of dialogues he speculates about physical reality might be shaped by the transcendent, but I think those concerns are far from the heart of Plato's concern with "God.")