As a wedding present to ourselves, my wife and I bought the DVDs of the original Star Trek, and these past few months, we’ve been working our way through them. For myself, it was a test: I hadn’t seen most of these episodes since my childhood, and I was curious to see if they held up. I’m pleased to say that, for the most part, they more than hold their own. There’s plenty to criticize, but after all this time, it hasn’t lost its charm.
Despite everything that makes me roll my eyes about Star Trek – the dated special effects, the hammy acting, the hackneyed plots, the ludicrous science – there’s a powerful heart of optimism beating beneath the surface of the show. The idea that human beings have conquered our own divisions and become united as a species, that we’re setting out to explore the universe purely for the sake of exploration, that we’ve become members of a galactic civilization of intelligent life – for all these reasons, the world of Trek could be fairly described as a utopian vision of humanist philosophy. And that’s why it’s no surprise that Star Trek‘s creator, Gene Roddenberry, was himself a humanist and a nonbeliever.
As Susan Sackett, Roddenberry’s longtime personal assistant, put it to a humanist group in Massachusetts:
Ms. Sackett said that Star Trek, like humanism, promoted ethics, social justice and reason, and rejected religious dogma and the supernatural…. She said Mr. Roddenberry, who lectured in Worcester in the 1990s, strived in his Star Trek ventures to affirm the dignity of all people.
“Rationality was the key… There was no recourse to the supernatural,” she said.
Ms. Sackett said Roddenberry was so resolute about religion that he refused suggestions to add a chaplain to the crew of the starship Enterprise.
And Roddenberry himself said:
“I have always been reasonably leery of religion because there are so many edicts in religion, ‘thou shalt not,’ or ‘thou shalt.’ I wanted my world of the future to be clear of that.” (source)
Brannon Braga, one of the original writers and producers, expressed similar thoughts at a 2006 atheist conference in Iceland:
STAR TREK, as conceived by Gene Roddenberry, portrays the epic saga of humanity’s exploration of space and, in turn, their own struggles as a species. Every episode and movie of STAR TREK is a morality tale in which human beings find solutions to conflict through enlightenment and reason. Through science. Through wit and intellect. Through a belief in our potential as animals that can supercede our baser instincts. In Gene Roddenberry’s imagining of the future (in this case the 23rd century), Earth is a paradise where we have solved all of our problems with technology, ingenuity, and compassion. There is no more hunger, war, or disease. And most importantly to the context of our meeting here today, religion is completely gone. Not a single human being on Earth believes in any of the nonsense that has plagued our civilization for thousands of years. This was an important part of Roddenberry’s mythology. He, himself, was a secular humanist and made it well-known to writers of STAR TREK and STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION that religion and superstition and mystical thinking were not to be part of his universe. On Roddenberry’s future Earth, everyone is an atheist. And that world is the better for it.
Star Trek‘s humanist ethic comes through clearly in several classic episodes, including “Who Mourns for Adonais?”, in which the crew of the Enterprise is confronted by an alien being who claims to be the god Apollo and demands their worship; or the Next Generation episode “Who Watches the Watchers?”, in which the crew’s existence accidentally becomes known to a primitive society, and they must convince those people that they are not gods.
With all that said, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that Star Trek has spawned its own devotees who follow and imitate the show with an almost religious fervor. But even this, I think, is testimony to the hunger for an optimistic, humanist vision of the future, one not based on the supernatural, and that’s the kind of thing that all atheists should be doing our utmost to provide.
Other posts in this series: