In a recent Sunday editorial section of my local paper, The Ottawa Citizen, the editorial pages editor Leonard Stern was waxing philosophical about an exhibit by German photographer Walter Schels, who photographed people who knew they were dying (usually of some terminal disease), and would later return to photograph the same person just after they’d died. Stern, like many people including me, found the photographs to be very affecting. But he went on to try to explain why they affected him. At one point he said (about the photos) “… why then are they nevertheless comforting? Perhaps it’s the camera’s ability to capture the emptiness of the cadavers. The spark that animated the physical body has vanished in a puff. You sense that something - call it the soul - has departed, and if the soul has departed, that means it must exist. The strangeness of the hollow bodies confirms that we are more than our corporeal, impermanent selves.”

Upon reading this, I wrote a Letter to the Editor that will likely never be published:

I hate to disillusion Leonard Stern - I probably can’t, actually - but maybe the “spark” that’s missing from the after-death photos at www.guardian.co.uk/society/gallery/2008/mar/31/lifebeforedeath is just a spark in the literal sense.

Perhaps what he perceives as changed from the before pictures to the after pictures is not that a “soul” has departed and (presumably) gone somewhere else to continue existence, but rather that a bioelectric field that resulted from billions of nerve and brain and other cells, all operating in concert, has merely been extinguished.

It’s not comforting, but as William of Occam (he of the principle known as Occam’s Razor) might agree, it is the simpler, more straightforward explanation than one that needs unknowable “spirit”/soul things and a whole fanciful other universe to house them. It is also one that might eventually be testable, whereas the soul hypothesis really cannot. Ah, but that’s the comforting part of postulating a soul and a spirit world, I guess - what can never be tested can never be disproved.

That’s the way I see it, anyway.

Copyright 2008