I did a little digging myself before I met him to find out what a skeptic really was. I knew the connotations, but if you go back to the ancient Greeks, you find that Skepticism started with a philosopher named Pyrrho. Not only was he the pupil of Socrates, but he also escorted Alexander the Great on his voyage into the mysterious East. Pyrrho was not some blow-hard, but a sage who advanced the idea that NO truth was final, and one could advance only critical opinions after careful inquiry into gathered facts. No knowledge was certain, and at that, the skeptics were content to say that even Skepticism might not be the truest mode of philosophy.

So back to Monsieur Berger. I spoke to him about reported cases of the Virgin Mary appearing in France to several different people, two of them being granted sainthood as a result: Bernadette Soubirous and Catherine Laboure. In both cases and several others, Patrick offered extraordinary arguments that debunked what many feel are vouchsafed miracles. He had me pretty convinced, I must say.

But we shouldn't regard doubt and skepticism as enemies of religious faith in and of themselves. One of Patrick's famous countrymen, a fellow named Rene Descartes, used a starting point of doubt not only to arrive at a substantiation of his own existence, but that of God's as well. In a gross simplification, by doubting that he existed, his self-same thought process proved that he did (cogito ergo sum / "I think therefore I am"). Once Descartes proved to himself that he existed, he took his doubt a step further and tried to strip away his belief in God to realize how he could have gotten it in his head in the first place. He came to reason that since no facet of human experience or what comes in through the senses can in itself or in combination, create the notion of an omnipotent and omniscient deity, only God himself could have placed that thought in human minds. Descartes used doubt and skepticism to prove God real, and a shameless self-promoter at that.

So fast-forward some 300 years to me and Mr. Berger debating miracles on the banks of the Seine. As he returned each of my "serves" with brilliantly reasoned returns and practically unassailable footwork, I realized something about my own volley between faith and doubt. For whatever backwater of experience and psychology, I wanted these miracles to be true. Maybe not word for word in some fundamentalist way, but the big idea, the category, the kingdom: Miracle, I want that, I like that and Mr. Berger could sense it. It seemed to make him more and more persuasive in dismantling them so I finally asked him: "What if you experienced a miracle, something that no faculty of science or reason could explain, would you put miracles on the bar graph then?"

With this, his play finally faltered and I had found his weakness - it was the same as mine: we were both weighed down by Faith. He answered an emphatic "no" to my question, with the rejoinder that he would search for answers with the tools of science, and what he couldn't answer now, he had faith that science would answer eventually. Monsieur Berger, the skeptic whose school of thought cautioned against claiming any final universal truths, had done just that. But his faith simply has a different iconography- his rosary, the abacus; his devotional candle, the Bunsen burner; his collection plate, the petri dish (sorry, I haven't done science since high school - you get the point).

But I have read about the seemingly metaphysical breakthroughs in physics like Heisenberg's "Uncertainty Principle" showing that the consciousness of a human observer actually changes the behavior of subatomic particles (OK, so I watched "What the Bleep do we Know?") . At this, his eyes lit up with my ability to speak his language. He finally admitted that, "there is much we still don't understand", but even then, he treated the word faith like kryptonite.

As I came away from our riverside chat, my mind was buzzing. The talk of physics jogged my memory that for every negatively charged electron in the universe, there is a complimentarily charged positron. Mr. Berger and I both took Faith as our start point, and it was only Doubt
that gave us opposite charges. But could either of us, can any of us, really be naked to the universe? Can we cast off faith, doubt, bias or basis? Should we want to? Would the universe reveal itself to us then?

If like Pyrrhics and Skeptics claim, there are no final truths we can swear by, then why not choose the faith that fits us best and be happy? Why not agree to disagree. So while I don't want to make too much of it, maybe if there if there is other life out there in the universe, they might learn something of humanity and its spirit by the sample that was me and Patrick Berger chasing the infinite in the center of Paris, planet Earth.