There's no God in the Star Trek universe – and an exchange relayed by Entertainment Weekly confirms it.
Filming an episode of the forthcoming Star Trek: Discovery, Jason Isaacs as Captain Gabriel Lorca instructs his crew to target a Klingon warbird, ad-libbing 'Fire at something, for God's sakes!'
However, director Kirsten Beyer tells him he can't say that, explaining creator Gene Roddenberry's vision of the future in the 23rd century does not include religion.
'Wait, I can't say 'God'?' Isaacs asks Beyer, according to EW. 'I thought I could say 'God' or 'damn' but not 'goddamn.''
He then asks: 'How about 'for f—'s sake'? Can I say that?'
Her answer: 'You can say that before you can say 'God.'
Roddenberry's atheism has long been acknowledged in the series, as the Daily Telegraph notes. In the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode Who Watches the Watchers?, Captain Jean-Luc Picard is mistaken for a God by a primitive civilization and insists on telling them there is no God. '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 was raised as a Baptist but lost his faith as a teenager, once telling Humanist Magazine: 'I guess from that time it was clear to me that religion was largely nonsense, largely magical, superstitious things. In my own teen life, I just couldn't see any point in adopting something based on magic, which was obviously phony and superstitious.'
However, series fans have pointed out numerous examples in both the original and 'Next Generation' series in which religion is mentioned, often favourably.
