UK Edition
New Star Trek series confirms there is no God in the Trek universe
Buried in an Entertainment Weekly story on the upcoming series Star Trek: Discovery is an anecdote that sheds light on whether religion exists in the Star Trek universe.
During filming, British actor Jason Isaacs, who portrays the ship Discovery's captain Gabriel Lorca, ad-libbed the line "for God's sakes", only for the episode's writer to stop filming and correct him.
"Wait, I can't say 'God'?" Isaacs is reported to have asked. "I thought I could say 'God' or 'damn' but not 'goddamn.'"
Kirsten Beyer, the episode's writer, then explained to Isaacs that Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry specifically set his creation in a future where religion no longer exists.
"How about 'for f — 's sake'?" Isaac replied. "Can I say that?"
"You can say that before you can say 'God,'" Beyer joked.
This won't be news to many devoted Trekkies, however, as Roddenberry's atheism has long been acknowledged within the series. Its most notable depiction was in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode Who Watches the Watchers?, in which Captain Jean-Luc Picard is mistaken for a God by a primitive civilization. Picard later rejects the idea of not confirming the truth to the people, citing mankind's long-ago rejection of religious faith.
"Millennia ago, they abandoned their belief in the supernatural," Picard says. "Now you are asking me to sabotage that achievement, to send them back into the dark ages of superstition and ignorance and fear? No!"
Roddenberry himself was raised as a Baptist, but began to reject his faith in his teenage years, later identifying as a Humanist.
"I guess from that time it was clear to me that religion was largely nonsense, largely magical, superstitious things," he once told Humanist Magazine. "In my own teen life, I just couldn't see any point in adopting something based on magic, which was obviously phony and superstitious.
"I can't say I didn't care about it or examine it; I just let it pass lightly over me. Religion was so full of inconsistencies that I could see no point in arguing each inconsistency out. It was background noise that you ignore."
Star Trek: Discovery lands at Netflix UK on September 25