Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto

Travel Beyond God?
March 7, 2004
Palo Alto, CA
Reverend Amy Zucker

First in a three-part series inspired by Star Trek

In one of the most memorable episodes of the original Star Trek series, the starship Enterprise finds itself literally in the grip of a man of incredible size and powerful who claims to be Apollo. As the story unfolds, it seems that he and others did in fact once live on Earth's Mount Olympus, where their superhuman powers gave rise to the stories of the Greek and Roman gods. The others faded away when earth's people stopped believing in them, but he has stubbornly hung on. After thus explaining away the religion of an entire civilization, the writers go a step further. Kirk declares boldly, to Apollo, the audience, the censors and everyone, "Mankind has no need for gods." He immediately adds, "We find the one sufficient," but an observant fan can't help noticing that this seems like a defensive move on the part of the writers rather than a sincere theological assertion by Kirk. He speaks with such defiance, and why phrase it in that way - "Mankind has no need for gods" - if what he means is only that we prefer monotheism to polytheism? The natural way to phrase an abandonment of polytheism would be "we have no need for more than one god," or "we no longer believe in the gods of Greece and Rome," not this sweeping statement of atheism.

Most of all, what makes the initial declaration "Mankind has no need for gods" sound sincere and the plug for monotheism sound like an afterthought for the censors' sake is the overall context of Star Trek's theology. Over and over, in the original series in particular, the message about God is that by the enlightened 23rd century, the concept will be outmoded. There are a few exceptions, but on the whole, the show portrays believers in gods as dupes, and predicts that the dominant religious beliefs of our time will have justly receded into myth - just as Apollo and his brother and sister Olympians have become myths for us. (I'm only talking about the first two series - Star Trek and Star Trek: The Next Generation - and the movies, because after the first two series I lost interest and/or channel reception.)

Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek, expressed the same impatience with gods as the captain he created. From adolescence, he told The Humanist magazine, "it was clear to me that religion was largely nonsense, was largely magical, superstitious things."¹ He therefore created a future humanity that had left it behind. His version of the future was not utopian, but it was very optimistic: a humanity that had put superstition, bigotry and war behind it (most of the time), and was employing its united powers to explore and learn rather than conquer. In that context, there is no doubt that the absence of religion among the human crew of the Enterprise, and the skepticism expressed by the heroes, are heartily endorsed by the creator and writers.

One of Star Trek's favorite plots is the one where a god (or, in one case, a devil) is unmasked as a pretender, or, often, a computer.

There is that matter of Apollo in the episode "Who Mourns for Adonais?" His powers are genuine, but they come from a generator in his temple, not from a supernatural source. By the end of the episode, the Enterprise fires on the generator, and crying out that "there is no room for gods," Apollo follows Athena and Zeus into oblivion.

In "The Apple," a tribe of innocent, unquestioning people have seemingly eternal life on an Edenlike planet. Their only obligation seems to be to bring food daily to the great cavelike mouth of their god, Vaal. To the more technologically advanced Earth people, it is obvious that Vaal is merely a machine. When the Enterprise is held by Vaal's tractor beam, the crew free themselves by utterly and finally draining Vaal's power - by killing the god. Kirk assures the shocked planet-dwellers that Vaal was not the source of the rain and the fruit trees, that they can go on without him. (So much for the Enterprise's Prime Directive of non-interference.)

In this theology, where deities are powerful but not truly divine, unbelief is a strength, faith a liability. In "Devil's Due," a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode, a planet-hopping con artist masquerades as one civilization's devil, returning to collect on a Faustian bet. The people of the planet are helpless because they believe in the Devil; when a woman fitting the description demands payment, it doesn't even occur to them to question whether she is who she claims to be. But the crew of the Enterprise are not so easily duped, because they have outgrown a belief in the devil and therefore look to other, less supernatural explanations. Armed with their unbelief, they expose the scam.

In these and many other incidents, the show portrays belief in God as a prison, and shows that a better life awaits those who have freed themselves, or are freed by the Enterprise's intervention. In "The Return of the Archons," the crew travels to a planet whose people live in a zombielike state of bliss most of the time; they erupt into mayhem during a designated Red Hour and then return to their blank contentment. The force behind this bizarre behavior is their god, Landru, who demands absolute conformity and punishes unbelievers with death. The Enterprise team beams down in disguise, and as in "The Apple," their superior experience of technology makes it obvious to them that the vision of Landru is some kind of projection. When Kirk and Spock break into the priests' inner sanctum, they are therefore not surprised to discover that the omniscient deity is in fact a computer that has been sending out commands for thousands of years. Once, long ago, there was a real ruler named Landru, but this has been forgotten and his wise rule has degraded into the mindless dictatorship of a machine. Once again, Kirk destroys the computer, and the message of the episode is clearly that the people are better off freed from slavish obedience, and from their god.

The overlap between gods and computers is significant, because if there's anything Roddenberry distrusts as much as religion, it's technology, and computers in particular. It's ironic, given that the Enterprise couldn't get out of the solar system without them, but it's true - I could list half a dozen episodes where a machine goes awry, or takes its programming too literally, and causes devastation. The common thread between computers and gods is this: both are creations of humankind, meant to be our servants, not our masters. When we forget who is the creator and who the creation, we get into trouble.

With computers, the lesson is: be careful - stay in control of your machines lest they take control of you. With gods, the lesson is more complex. If gods are supposed to be the creators of humanity and all we behold, and instead they are revealed to be created by us, then they are not only dangerous - they're useless. What is the use of a god that is the created instead of the creator? (I have some thoughts about that, actually. The short answer is "quite a lot of use, actually" - but the long answer will have to wait for another sermon.)

But to return to the unmasked gods of Star Trek . . . The upshot is that in the 23rd century, we have indeed moved beyond the need for gods. We invented them when we needed them, millenia ago, the same way that we later came to invent computers and starships and transporters. But now, that is, in the 23rd century, they are holding us back. As Spock says of the civilization that worships Landru, "All is peace and tranquillity--the peace of the factory, the tranquillity of the machine."² Trapped in a pattern set 6,000 years earlier, they have all but lost their humanity; they have ceased to grow. They must leave behind their god to grow into full maturity and full humanity. Shortly after Kirk destroys the false god Landru, he receives a report from the planet's surface that now that the state of bliss has come to an end, "It may not be paradise, but it's certainly human."³

Is it true that with human progress, we leave gods behind? When the Soviet Union sent the first people into space, it's said (possibly apocryphally) that the cosmonauts reported that God was nowhere to be seen. It would be naive indeed to think that God was floating outside Earth's atmosphere, and anyone who had thought that before 1961 would have had their faith shattered, or at least challenged, by the discoveries of space travelers. But a more sophisticated understanding of divinity might (and did) counter that God doesn't live in the sky in the naive sense that a child might believe, and that a cosmonaut might so easily mock.

Likewise, is it true that in our travels through space and mind, we have left God behind? Does it make sense to say that our progress renders the concept of divinity obsolete? Or, like the cosmonaut and those he mocked, do we need to broaden our idea of God?

The wonderful thing about travel is that it truly does expand our horizons. Old categories crumble and new ideas must replace the ones that no longer fit the world we perceive. The very idea of a Creator of heaven and earth has had to expand to mean the creator of the entire universe, which is much bigger than the authors of the Bible ever imagined. But the obsolescence of an old version of an idea does not make the entire idea obsolete. The question is, what kind of God, if any, is still compatible with what we now know about our world?

The worshipers of Landru and Vaal see miracles all around them. Because they cannot explain how their every transgression is overheard, or why the rain falls and the trees grow, they imagine that there must be an all-knowing, all-powerful god. Then the enlightened folk of the Enterprise come along, with their knowledge of computers and listening devices, meteorology and biology. The experiences that so amaze the others have simple explanations if you know the science - just as someone with a transporter, a common piece of technology in the 23rd-century, would seem to us to work a miracle by appearing out of thin air.

Roddenberry seems to have thought that the meaning of "god" is "the thing that makes apparent miracles occur," so that when the miracles are explained, God is explained away. If one has such a childlike idea of God, then that is true–just as one who believes God lives in the sky loses that God once people begin to travel through the heavens. The argument that God is whatever makes the inexplicable happen has been called the "god of the gaps" approach, and it is a notoriously unsound way to prove God's existence, because science continually shrinks the gaps. Those whose god has filled the breach in our knowledge with a miracle find that their god has little to do once the miracle is explained in naturalistic terms. For example, the movement of the planets used to be credited to angels who rolled them along their course. The enormous strides of astronomy taken by Galileo and others provided another explanation, so God was no longer invoked to fill that particular gap. Even those who do not believe the inquiries of science will ever be complete can see that a God who is invoked only to fill the gaps in our knowledge is a very tenuous God.

But there are many other concepts of God besides "the explanation for the thus-far inexplicable" - or, for that matter, "the Creator" or "the giver of answers." The great thing about exploring strange new worlds is that they back our old ideas right up into a corner and we suddenly find we had better discover some new ones. Human progress pushes us beyond some of our old ideas of God - we seized upon some ideas when we needed them, and as our needs change, we outgrow the gods we invented.

Perhaps what space travel can do for us, whether the travels are in reality or in the imagination of creators like Gene Roddenberry, is to clear away so many mysteries and miracles that we at last abandon our idea that God is the power that suspends the laws of nature. Already, in our age of science and reason, many have come to define God as a force within nature, or Nature itself. Captain Kirk never quite did that; he continued to accept older definitions of God and to knock down what has become something of a straw figure.

Do we still need gods? Not to explain why the volcano erupts or the crops grow, perhaps; not even to explain why people came to be, or why other humanoids populate other planets, if they do. (Another Star Trek episode gives an answer to that question - an atheistic one - and by the way, in case you were wondering, the reason all these humanoids and Earthlings can understand each other is that the Enterprise has a universal translator.) But once reason and observation fulfill the need to understand how things work, and we no longer seek an explanation for miracles, we may find that other, long-obscured needs emerge.

If we have need of gods, they are different gods than Apollo of Olympus, or God the white-bearded sky-father. We do not need to go into space to find a world where miracles are explained; we live there now. And we do not need to travel on the Enterprise to go beyond our old ideas, and discover what divinity may lie within the worlds we know.

Footnotes:

1. Interview with David Alexander, April/May 1991 issue of The Humanist, April/May 1991..
2. Boris Sobelman, Star Trek, “The Return of the Archons,” February 9, 1967.
3. “The Return of the Archons.”