Bill Bass

Dr. Bill Bass, prof. of forensic anthropology at Univ. of Tennessee at Knoxville, and head of the UT Anthropology Research Facility, better known as "The Body Farm."

Supporting documentation: His book Death's Acre: Inside the Legendary Forensic Lab, The Body Farm, Where the Dead Do Tell Tales (2003, G.P. Putnam's Sons):

p. 214: "All my life I'd been a believing Christian. ... But that instant in the ER--the instant Annette [his wife] died--I seemed to feel my religious faith die, too.

"As I thought more about it in the bleak days and weeks that followed, I decided the Bible had gotten it exactly backward. Maybe God hadn't created us in His image; maybe we'd created God in *our* image."

p. 279: "Once upon a time I believed in an afterlife. I believed in it for fully sixty years after my father shot himself. But then Ann died, and then Annette [his second wife] died, and suddenly nothing I'd grown up believing about God and heaven made any sense to me any longer. We're organisms; we're conceived, we're born, we live, we die, and we decay. But as we decay we feed the world of the living: plants and bugs and bacteria."