I’ve long been the type of person who has to think through something, dissect it, fully understand it, overanalyze it to the point of near mental exhaustion, before I can move ahead and take action. In other words, I am a lot like most people: I think way too much, about too many things, way too often.
As a result, when it comes to deciding whether to take on a new project, buy something, write a book, make friends, I don’t just jump in without analyzing the logic of a decision—weighing pluses and minuses, the relative merit of my choice. Ultimately, I always ask myself: Will the investment of my time and energy yield a result that will make the effort worthwhile?
So it’s entirely consistent with my character that I haven’t even quite started my journey to find God in Hollywood and I’m already making it an exercise in egoistic overthinking.
The reason for my trepidation isn’t because I don’t want to find God. In fact, I deeply desire making the discovery—or rediscovery—of that connection. In the past, at times when I had faith in a greater, wiser force in the universe with whom I could talk, thank, ask for guidance, I was a happier, healthier, more content and productive human being. So it’s a no-brainer for me to want to find that kind of sacred space again.
Even so, there’s a red light preventing me from stepping on the gas pedal that might lead me back to God. And like most things in my life that have gnawed at me, what hinders me now is a question: Does God even exist? After all, atheism, the belief that deities do not exist, is at least as old as theism itself.
I’ve experienced what I have interpreted as seeing “God” at various moments in my life—in a sunset over the horizon on the island of Kauai, praying in times of crisis, emerging from brain surgery with a new lease on life, looking into the eyes of my newborn children, moments of stillness hiking in the mountains or splayed out on a yoga mat, making love with someone for the first time, drenched in sweat on the ice amid a hockey game in which I felt like I had transcended my physical self. But I still can’t prove beyond a reasonable doubt to anyone, no less myself, that God exists. In fact, no one can. Not the pope, not the Dalai Lama; no highly enlightened mortal has yet come up with the irrefutable “evidence” of the type that the Western ego-mind has come to demand as proof of anything these days. That’s why they call it believing in God, not knowing there’s a God. It requires belief—a leap of faith.
On the other hand, it would also take a leap for me to conclude I do not believe even in the slightest possibility of a Higher Power behind all that we experience as the universe.
The more I think about this question—that the very premise of my search for God may be faulty—it seems reasonable for me to poke the anti-faith bear before I go chasing something that may be a fantasy, a psychological crutch, a comforting myth that we humans have concocted and codified to make the bleak reality of our inevitable demise less damn depressing and mysterious.
Luckily, finding atheists in Hollywood is about as easy as finding injected lips and fake boobs—that is, they are seemingly everywhere you look. But some (atheists, not implants) are more vocal and articulate about their anti-faith faith than others.
I remember hearing Howard Stern being asked if he believed in God, to which he replied, “I know intellectually there is no God. But in case there is, I don’t want to piss Him off by saying it.”
Not only is Howard’s candor good comedy, it’s also poignant. While I think in my heart that I believe in God, I don’t know this to be true in my brain with any certainty. So if and when I get to the mythical pearly gates, it makes sense to hedge my bets in favor of there being a God, just in case. That is, it seems more plausible than implausible. Certainly, I would profess faith in the biblical God before I would in Kanye “Yeezus” West being the Messiah. I have met many of these kind of wishy-washy, better-safe-than-sorry believers in my life. I call them the Just-in-Case Christians. As in, they’re gonna go through the motions of believing…just in case. Call it the Gospel According to Howard Stern.
But so often throughout history religious folks have made it so hard to buy into their dogmas. Comedian and liberal political commentator Bill Maher has made rants against organized religion a staple of his routine. Maher even made a documentary about how ridiculous religion is (aptly titled Religulous).
Maher, like many in the modern, post–Scientific Revolution atheist camp, shuns any belief system that is not “evidence-based.” But he also has said, “I am open to anything for which there is evidence. Show me a God and I will believe in Him,” at the same time defining faith as “the purposeful suspension of critical thinking.”
While there are plenty of pro-faith celebrities promoting various religious traditions, the list of those who have declared their lack of faith in God is long, among them Emma Thompson, Billy Joel, Jodie Foster, Julianne Moore, Daniel Radcliffe, Keira Knightley, James Cameron, Seth MacFarlane, Ricky Gervais…and it goes on and on.
But included on that list is someone I know: Adam Carolla. Adam is a comedian, mega-popular podcaster, radio host, and author whom I met many years ago when I was a correspondent for People.
Along with his pal Jimmy Kimmel, the often acid-tongued Adam served as co-host of a short-lived but memorably absurd variety show on Comedy Central called The Man Show, in which the two dudes sat at a bar and celebrated the macho clichés of modern manhood: beer, sports, chicks, beer. Every episode ended with “Cheerleaders Jumping on Trampolines,” a segment in which, well…the title speaks for itself.
A middle-aged man obsessed with cheerleaders may seem an unlikely interview subject with whom I would choose to address the deepest of deep questions: whether God exists. But I’ve been around Adam long enough to know that, really, he’s a button-down thinker wrapped in a mechanic’s jumpsuit.
Adam and I have run into each other over the years—on a radio show he used to host, at a celebrity grand prix or two, one time at a furniture store on La Brea Avenue in Hollywood—and we have some mutual friends. I wouldn’t call us best friends by any stretch of the definition, but I do have his number (which often qualifies one as a bona fide friend among the Hollywood set).
Adam has long been a vocal atheist, voicing very impassioned explanations for his opinion on the topic of God, religion, and faith, including this definitive declaration on his radio show:
I am not agnostic. I am an atheist. I don’t think there’s no God. I know there’s no God. I know there’s no God the way I know many other laws in our universe. I know there’s no God and I know that most of the world knows that as well. They just won’t admit it because there’s another thing they know: they are going to die. And it freaks them out. Most people don’t have the courage to admit that there’s no God and that they know it….It freaks them out. Because life is filled with tragedy and it’s filled with worse than tragedy: the unknown.
I sent Adam an email a few weeks ago telling him about my “search for God,” and about how I had decided to write a book about it since there are a lot of other people out there also trying to figure out what the heck they believe and hey, maybe reading about my journey will in some way help them figure out what they believe. Or what they don’t believe. Which is where Adam comes in.
I suggested we meet up at a church or synagogue or some other counterintuitively clever place to talk about this topic. But we couldn’t find a time that matched our busy schedules, so Adam, as known for being a car nut as he is for being opinionated, suggested he call me while he is in his preferred place of worship: his car.
It’s a Saturday morning and I can hear in the background the rumble of the road as he’s driving on Highway 14 to a racing school in the desert an hour north of L.A.
“Ken, I gotta be honest with ya,” Adam says in his trademark nasal twang that always makes him sound cranky. “Growing up, I never set foot inside a church. In fact, I never spent any time around religious people until I was probably twenty-four and worked installing closets with some born-again Christian gang-bangers who had found religion in jail.”
“That was really your first exposure?” I ask. “You had never even been dragged to church?”
“Well, yeah,” Adam says. “I mean, I had seen weirdo preachers on TV and would see people going in and out of church or whatever, but I just didn’t grow up with religion. It wasn’t something my family ever talked about and so I never really thought about it. I grew up in a weird spiritual vacuum in North Hollywood in the ’70s. My family wasn’t atheists, per se. Religion was just not something we ever discussed. So I have never had a leaning toward [it] and I have never felt the need to search for anything.”
I tell him I was raised Roman Catholic, attended Sunday school, and that I was taught you could talk to God through prayer, which He may or may not answer, but that He heard. “It always made me feel good knowing God was there,” I explain. “Sort of like having a friend with you all the time who will listen.”
“I respect that, Ken,” Adam says. “I’m not saying you’re an idiot for talking to a God you have never seen or heard or can even prove exists. I’m not one of those atheist guys who think that. I’m just saying that, to me, maybe simply because, unlike you, it wasn’t something I was taught, I think it’s all fantasy. No offense to you, if you still think that God will—”
“Honestly, I’m not sure what I think anymore,” I butt in. “That’s why I wanted to talk to you. I think you could be right. Maybe there is no God. Maybe I will be better off—and happier—if I stop stressing out over finding something that doesn’t exist.”
Adam laughs. “Hey, man. Don’t get me wrong. I think the world would be a better place if everyone followed the Ten Commandments starting tomorrow and thought that talking to God rather than blowing shit up and hurting people was a better choice in life. But you don’t need religion to be a good person. You don’t need some dude in a beard and stone tablets to claim God gave him those. Religious people make the argument quite often that God determines right from wrong, but I find that line of thinking a little bit insulting. Intuitively, I believe nature has an order to it and it has instilled that moral compass in our brains. Think about it, Ken. We are not programmed to eat our kids upon birth because that wouldn’t work well from a natural, evolution standpoint. There would be, like, zero natural order in it. I didn’t eat my kids when they were born because it is not my instinct—not from my fear of God or that the LAPD will arrest me. Another example is that it is not in me to kill someone or steal possessions. These are all things we rely on not only for us in nature, but also our species and other species as well. You don’t need to be religious to know right from wrong. I don’t need a sanctioning body to tell me that it is wrong for me to stand behind you in line at Pinkberry and take your vanilla sundae out of your hand. It’s just obvious. What’s yours is yours and mine is mine. That is how we both can coexist. It’s best for our species. It’s something that is wired into our DNA so that we can propagate our species.”
Clearly, I have reached out to the right atheist.
“Can I chime in for a second?” I interrupt his rant.
“Of course,” Adam says. “Sorry, I just don’t shut up when it comes to this topic.”
I tell Adam that Bill Maher likens believing in God to believing in Santa Claus.
“Would you agree with Bill? I ask him.
“Well, I am pretty darn close to Bill Maher on that topic,” Adam says. “I think we all can agree that Santa Claus doesn’t exist, OK. But even though he doesn’t exist, I can tell you that he has brought a lot of joy to my kids. Not only do they love the idea of Santa Claus, but also his little Elf on the Shelf, which by the way is another magical godlike deity. I have no problem with them believing in Santa as long as they aren’t hurting themselves or others. That’s the problem with religion. The whole religion-on-religion crime thing is out of control and has been for thousands of years. Look at what is happening in the Middle East on a daily basis. I don’t like religions in the sense that often it creates two teams. At some point, one team always decides that the other team needs to be eliminated. I like Judaism, but I don’t like [how] they’re always fighting with Muslims and vice versa. I don’t like that division. It creates a battle that has shed a lot of blood over the years. There are many religions that are peaceful. If everyone were just a Buddhist I wouldn’t give a shit. There are many religions that are peaceful and I don’t mind those at all. Religion just seems like an outdated thing. I don’t think we need it anymore. It causes more harm than good.”
While not exactly a theologian, Adam is making some sense. Much of what he is saying is stuff I have thought myself at some point, logical conclusions based on observing what crazy things people do in the name of God. But while I do agree with Adam that organized religion has divided as much—or more than—as it has united, the question of God’s existence is, to me, a whole other department outside of religion. In fact, I feel as if my faith in a God, however slight, might come from an instinctual, almost cosmic connection to the universe.
I have never been able to commit to an anti-God belief anywhere near as much as Adam. There’s an argument that I can’t be anti-God because I was brainwashed at an early age to believe. Fair enough. But my inability to not see the hand of God in our material life extended well beyond my easily impressionable childhood, and into college, when I could make adult, sensible observations.
Case in point: As an undergrad at Colgate University, I majored in geology, and something that always led me back to believing in a God or a force or a Higher Power or a Great Architect was that whether I was studying the molecular structure of a quartz crystal or a slab of volcanic rock, it all seemed so perfectly complex that my critical mind kept concluding it couldn’t have been created randomly.
And even if it were created by total luck and happenstance, who or what created and enabled that randomness to happen? I have never found any definitive answer to this question. To me it seems more likely than not that a force of some sort is behind it all.
“But who or what made our DNA?” I ask Adam. “What programmed our genetic computers not to kill each other?”
Adam sighs. “Look, the honest answer is that I don’t fucking know. But that doesn’t mean I have to go believing in something just in case God made all this shit—you know, just to hedge my bets.”
“But don’t you wonder how this reality we experience came into existence?” I ask. “I mean, I do. All the time. Not knowing what or who made all this really bugs me.”
“Of course I have thought about that!” he answers, sounding rather indignant. “But maybe the difference between you and me is that I am OK with not knowing. Reality is something you should only look for when you are really high, my friend. If you’re not rolling on peyote, then reality is this: The sun comes up, you wake up and go about your day and then the sun goes down. I am driving a car right now and if I mash the pedal down I will smash into this Hyundai in front of me. That is reality. Why do I need to come up with an answer to what made all this stuff I am experiencing as my reality? I have a lot of questions I don’t have an answer to—like why am I not attracted to dudes? I don’t know, I’m just not. That’s good enough for me.”
“Well,” I say, “I’ve tried not to care or not to need to know, but I can’t. I feel like I have this brain asking questions and it would be lazy of me, kind of irresponsible, not to examine it and try to answer them. I mean, that is what a lot of religion is about. It’s a framework, a set of stories and beliefs that help explain it all. I’m not saying they’re right or wrong, but I respect the intention because I also want to know. I want answers.”
“Ken, I am totally open to there being an answer that proves there is a God. If someone came up with a good argument, some solid evidence that there is a God or whatever, I would accept it. I would love nothing more than a good argument to get me talked out of being an atheist. It would take a lot of the mystery out of the world and I bet that would make a lot of people feel a whole lot better about life. But humans have been trying to make various arguments for why God exists for thousands of years and they still haven’t nailed it.”
As Adam pontificates, I realize I am pinching my brow and getting frustrated. Not because I necessarily disagree with Adam’s take on this God business, but because the more I listen to him the more I feel like I have left the state of California and entered the state of confusion.
“OK, OK,” I interrupt. “Can I ask you something?”
“You just did.”
I ignore his joke and turn serious. “The more I listen to you, the more I just want to know your bottom-line answer to this question: Do you think there is any chance that God exists?”
I can still hear the hum of his tires on the road. But I don’t hear Adam.
I break the silence. “In other words,” I say, “would you bet your life on it?”
“Uhhhhhmmmmhuuuuh.” Adam is making a sound somewhere between pondering and moaning. “That’s a real good question,” he says. “Look, if I told you that there is a zero percent chance of there being a God, I would be as guilty of being a hypocrite as much as some religious nut who believes I am going to hell because I don’t worship their God.”
“Wait a second,” I say. “You sound more like Carl Sagan than Bill Maher.”
“The astronomer guy?” Adam asks.
“Yeah.”
“What did Sagan say about all this God stuff?”
Luckily, I know the answer. Before talking to Adam, I had done a little research on the subject of atheism, and a lot of articles popped up on the late scientist’s take on the possibility of a God. Sagan, perhaps best known for his research into extraterrestrial life, was one of the first scientists who popularized the field of cosmology through his work in books and on TV, most famously as host of the PBS series Cosmos.
“Well, people assumed he was an atheist, but he wasn’t,” I explain. “He actually considered himself agnostic.”
I find a couple Sagan quotes on my laptop and read them aloud to Adam:
I am not an atheist. An atheist is someone who has compelling evidence that there is no Judeo-Christian-Islamic God. I am not that wise, but neither do I consider there to be anything approaching adequate evidence for such a god. Why are you in such a hurry to make up your mind? Why not simply wait until there is compelling evidence?
An atheist has to know a lot more than I know. An atheist is someone who knows there is no God.
I add, “The gist of it is that Sagan didn’t believe in a God, but he was very open to the idea. He just hadn’t seen enough evidence to support what he called the ‘God Hypothesis,’ saying, ‘I’d be fully willing to accept if there were compelling evidence; unfortunately, there is nothing approaching compelling evidence.’ ”
“So, there ya go!” Adam says brightly. “I would say I am with Sagan on this topic. I am probably about one percent agnostic. The rest of me is an atheist.”
“So then, you think God might actually exist?”
“Yeah,” he says. “But I am ninety-nine percent sure there is nothing.”
“So then, you realize that you’re not actually an atheist?”
“By that definition, no.”
“But you’re all over YouTube as one of the biggest atheists in Hollywood.” I laugh. “Did I just break some news here?”
“Yeah, but not really,” Adam jokes. “I’m still putting my money on there being no God.”
Adam says he’s gotta go, explaining that he is late for his hot-rod racing session at the track. So I thank him and we hang up. And as Adam is about to drive in circles at high speed, my brain revs in its own circles as I process that I had just interviewed one of the supposedly most ardent atheists in Hollywood but ended up basically converting him into an agnostic. This was not at all my intention. My plan was to be open to possibly being persuaded by Adam that the “God Hypothesis” is a flawed one not worth spending years trying to gather evidence for, not worth being wracked with existential angst over to the point where I am having panic attacks. Instead, I’ve come away from it feeling like some sort of proselytizer for theism, or, at the very least agnosticism.
I leave my house and go for a walk down to the ocean to watch some beach volleyball, hoping to take my mind off all this deep-shit debate. Despite my best effort to zone out under the sun, I can’t stop thinking about Adam’s philosophical flip-flop.
So I call my oldest brother, Kevin. Six years older than me, Kevin has long been my go-to for all things spirituality. Kevin, who lives outside Buffalo, New York, majored in Bible studies and for nearly twenty years pastored a nondenominational Christian church. Whenever I have a question about religion, I tap his vast knowledge. He is sort of my God Google.
“What’s up, brother?” Kevin answers.
I cut right to the chase. “I was wondering what the Bible says about atheists.”
Kevin scans his biblical brain for a few moments before replying, “Well, Christians often start with Psalm 14. Check that out.”
Thanks to my ear buds, I am hands-free and can search the passage on my phone and read it aloud to him.
Only fools say in their hearts,
“There is no God.”
They are corrupt, and their actions are evil;
not one of them does good!
“That’s pretty cut and dried,” I conclude. “The God in the Bible leaves no room for doubt.”
Kevin laughs. “Not exactly. I mean, God recognizes that humans will have doubt. It is part of the human experience. But why do you ask?”
I tell him about my conversation with Adam Carolla, how he basically waffled on his longstanding atheism position, and how in the process I realized that I am definitely not an atheist. “But I do have my doubts,” I add.
“That’s OK,” my brother says. “That means you are seeking. You should treat this search, this spiritual investigation that you’re doing, like one of your journalism projects. Ask the hard questions. God will lead you to the truth.”