What Does God Need…
…with a Starship…?
The most recent episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds has brought back into canon a somewhat controversial part of its cinematic past. To backtrack for a moment, in the late 80s, the Trek powers that be gave William Shatner a whole Trek film to direct because he was envious of the fact that his costar Leonard Nimoy had directed the previous two films in the series, both of which are highly memorable entries in the franchise; the latter of the two being both culturally significant in its promotion of the consequences of lax environmental stewardship, and economically significant for being the most profitable of the initial ten films in the Trek cinematic line, in terms of gross box office receipts. Where it concerns the controversy of the Shatner-helmed Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, the recent SNWs episode introduces back into canon the character of Sybok, the half-brother of Spock played, somewhat competently, by Laurence Luckinbill in ST V.
Trek fans can be a finicky lot, obsessing over minor technical details in the narrative or insignificant continuity errors, so I expect that this latest offering from what is by all accounts a great Trek series will inspire much narrow-minded debate and bring the errors of letting Kirk himself direct a film back into the limelight. I wont touch on those things myself because they are, for the most part, insignificant now that we are over thirty years removed from the film in question. What’s done is done, as they say. I will instead take the high road, as any Trekkie or sci-fi fan worth their intellectual salt would, and focus on the important messages the franchise has to offer, those being the relevant points about the human condition. In this case, I’ll be touching on the very salient question posed by the film, and Kirk himself in the mise-en-scène— “What does God need with a starship?”
For all of its flaws (and there are many) Star Trek V makes one salient point about religion — if we’re ever eventually confronted with incontrovertible proof of god, or what we’ve been told is god, that entity will then become accountable to the facts of reality. Kirk, of course, is the one who utters the famous question, because why not…? It was Shatner’s vanity project and he probably had a driving need to put himself in ‘the chair’ in every way possible. He’s Kirk, after all; the first and (arguably) greatest Trek captain to have ever appeared onscreen, nevermind that a good portion of the episodes in the TOS series are actually pretty bad when evaluated objectively. Regardless, that doesn’t diminish the symbolism of the film scene and it’s importance where commenting on reality and religion are concerned.
To break down the series of events in the film, so that you non-Trekkies have an idea of the meaning herein, the film starts with Sybok, a Vulcan rebel, raising an army of followers on a desolate planet through a form of quasi-religious brainwashing. Once he has control of the people in what passes for a ruling government on the planet, the cult hijacks a starship after an failed rescue attempt on the part of the Enterprise crew, in order to venture into the heart of the galaxy so as to find the god of Sha-ka-ree, a fabled deity in Vulcan mythology. They arrive at the planet, the supposed god reveals itself, and through circumstance is exposed as a fraud, a being imprisoned there by unknown forces. Chaos ensues, the heroes save the day and all is set right in the Trek universe once again…until the next film anyway…
In the narrative, Kirk was never subjected to Sybok’s brainwashing so he remained a rational agent throughout and when the god of the narrative revealed itself and asked to have the Enterprise brought closer to the planet where it was imprisoned, so as to escape, Kirk was naturally skeptical and asked the question — “What does God need with a starship?” The god reacts as any ego-maniac would, by taunting first, and then tormenting Kirk and the others in the landing party and generally revealing itself to be anything but a god by the standards of belief which set the characters on their quest in the first place.
For one thing, Kirk calls out the being for not knowing who he is, as any all-powerful deity should, if we’re to take at face value what it is that is a necessary attribute of a creator deity. Then the deity reveals itself to be a manipulative agent by revealing its agenda to Sybok and the others, showing Sybok that his quest for Sha-ka-ree was really about his own vanity and how easily he was manipulated into assuming it wasn’t. The implications of this series of events has so much to say about human nature where it concerns belief, myth, the internalizing of virtue and what will most likely occur if there is ever a shred of evidence produced to show that a creator like the christian Jehovah is possible and actually exists.
You see, Evangelicals talk a lot about being able to see their god in everything but they’ve never once been able to present tangible evidence for the same; evidence which unequivocally and irrefutably demonstrates that their god is real. If they had, the question would not remain and Atheists would not be a growing segment of the population. Non-believers are, naturally, skeptical because they can’t abide the mindset that says ‘I believe it to be true, therefore it is true.’ Facts matter, and when it comes to important claims about the nature of reality, the facts have to be pretty damned compelling if the assertions are to be accepted as valid. And Kirk challenging this imprisoned being on its fundamental nature embodies this ethos well.
My hypothesis on the matter of evidence is that believers are secretly wary of the whole question of evidence, because they lose even if evidence bears their beliefs out as fact. If christians ever actually manage to demonstrate the facts of their claims, which I doubt will ever happen, the minute their god becomes an aspect of actual reality, the limits of its god-hood become testable. It becomes accountable for all the things attributed to it as a purported omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent being. If we are allowed to test it, we learn what it is and what limits it has as a god-figure. If not, we have no reason to accept it as a benevolent entity and it’s value is depleted in terms of religious devotion.
If it proves itself all-powerful, then it can be judge ethically by all the harm it failed to stop. If it proves itself all-knowing, it becomes accountable to us for its overall agenda, which can’t be a very noble one given it knew of all the suffering which would occur in its name, and still proceeded anyway. If it proves itself ever-present, it then becomes accountable on the basis that it was always watching and always knew what was happening, and still failed to prevent this or that rapist/abuser from causing harm, to name one example.
What’s more it’s already been demonstrated that a deity which is all knowing, all powerful and ever-present can’t be all good, because such a deity would know things which are generally accepted as bad; like the sadistic pleasure which comes from causing harm. It would experience this sensation repeatedly, never taking the initiative to correct that flaw of human nature, thus making said entity an unethical agent in terms of human models of virtue. The common party line from believers is that the ways of god are unknowable and aren’t ours to judge. I for one, find this a load of shit because we can’t talk about the unknown without using the terminology of what is known to us.
What is known is that by the varied standards of human morality set forth today, as disparate as they are, it’s generally accepted that causing harm, or failing to prevent it, is a bad thing. And since it’s clear that an all-powerful entity can’t be a proper moral agent, on the basis of foreknowledge of harm and the failure to act, what is known is that it’s a false claim to make that Jehovah is an all-good, all-loving god when there is so much deliberate harm caused in the world today.
Of course, once we start testing the bounds of this god of theirs, once demonstrated as real, its majestic aura will diminish and it will be rendered moot, for the most part, as an object of divine worship. It will just be another element of reality, subject to the same rules of cosmic chance as the rest of us. It will no longer be a god in the grand religious sense, but merely a higher order of natural being; one which possibly plays games with lesser lifeforms in much the same way humans treat the rest of the fauna on this planet. In that sense, it will finally be demonstrated that we were created in ‘his’ image, as the bible says…but I digress.
So, as you can see, when it comes to the question of evidence, it is to the advantage of believers to never actually seek out tangible evidence, because they lose in the event they find it. It serves their purposes better to keep things vague, to never demonstrate the truth of their claims. It allows them the advantage of moral superiority, as flimsy as their premise is, and the ability to claim persecution, again on flimsy grounds, when they receive push-back on their bullshit. They sense a losing game and they prefer to stay on top for as long as they can, by any means available.
Non-believers, however, will always have the intellectually sound edge in this game, because rational inquiry will always be the better method of determining what is and isn’t true. At the end of the day, Star Trek V is still an embarrassment, just like believers and their claims, but it gets the reality of belief and religion correct because the more reasonable question to ask when faced with God is “What does God need with a starship?”
Adieu mes Amies.
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