This book investigates “God in the brain,” the capacity of the human brain to experience God. Helminiak incorporates neuroscience, psychology, spirituality, and theology, each specialization making “its proper contribution,” coalescing “in a coherent and comprehensive explanation of human mentality and its capacity for transcendent experiences” (365). Chapters 3 through 6 correspond to each of these specializations. Helminiak realizes that dealing adequately with this issue requires solving the mind‐body problem, and he finds the basis of this solution in Bernard Lonergan's “epistemology” (27).

Thus, in Chapter 2, “Epistemology: A Portentous Prolegomena,” Helminiak presents Lonergan's critically realist position that knowing is a compound of experiencing, understanding, and judging. Not all epistemologies identify all three as essential to knowledge. For example, the commonsense realisms of Wilbur, Searle, and Chalmers equate knowledge with experiencing. Lonergan's more complete identification of knowledge with correct judgment about one's insights into one's experiences is an epistemology “adequate to both physical and non‐physical reality,” and, therefore, to “the array of questions about the brain, the mind, the spiritual, the Divine, and their distinction and interrelationship” (79).

An epistemology that identifies knowing with experiencing cannot do justice to reality that is imperceptible. If knowing is like taking a look, reality is what can be looked at or otherwise perceived. Unfortunately, such an epistemology cannot make sense of non‐material reality, which is “not inherently conditioned by a spatio‐temporal array” (75). Lonergan's epistemology can, because it identifies the real not as the palpably experience‐able but as the meaningful/intelligible that can be affirmed on the basis of sufficient evidence. Meaning is “a non‐spatial, non‐temporal, intellectual content” (77), “in no way perceptible,” and its “potential range transcends the here and now, for example, a² + b² = c²” (76). We do not sense the intelligibility of anything, even of material reality, but we understand and affirm it. The same is true of the human mind and consciousness: unlike the brain, it cannot be looked at, but it can be understood and affirmed. If meaningful affirmability, not perceivability, is the criterion of the real, not only can human consciousness be affirmed as real, but “when the meanings really differ, the realities are different” (76), and, therefore, consciousness can be distinguished from the brain.

However, before explaining the mind‐body problem in detail in Chapter 4, Helminiak discusses “Neuroscience: The Biological Bases of Transcendent Experiences,” in Chapter 3. He summarizes neuroscientific research and theory that bears on transcendent experiences, saying that it is “only a matter of time before the neurological function” that is the basis of these experiences “will be understood” (107). In any case, “all research points to the same conclusion: biological factors constitute an essential aspect of transcendent experiences” (107). However, the “more pressing need is to turn to these human experiences themselves and to propose a coherent understanding of them and their relationship to neuronal function” (107).

In Chapter 4, “Psychology: The Problem of a Real Body and a Real Mind,” Helminiak presents various theories on the mind‐brain relationship and advances his own position that the mind is a distinct reality with its own laws and acts: self‐aware imagery, emotions, memories, insight, choice. These laws and acts of the mind, different from biological laws and acts, are real because they are meaningful and affirmable. The mind emerges as “a higher systematization of the sensate and perceptual functions of the organism and, as such, is different in kind from those functions and from the brain and its organic functioning” (367), that is, its “schemes of recurrence—the interactive function of cells, neurotransmitters, neurological pathways and networks, and patterns of neuronal activity” (239). As we do not study water by studying hydrogen and oxygen, so we do not study the mind by studying “neurons, transmitters, nuclei, tracts, brain networks, and their computer modeling,” but by studying “the person as a functioning whole” (237). While mind and brain are distinct, Helminiak insists on the importance and need of further work on the relationship between them.

In Chapter 5, “Spirituality: Consciousness and Transcendent Experiences,” Helminiak continues to explain the distinct intelligible realities of the human being—organism, psyche, and spirit—and then he investigates transcendent experiences in relation to the human spirit. The psyche “encompasses imagery, emotions, conations, and memory, which cohere to form personality structures, patterns of interactions by which people engage the world and one another in their own ways” (368). Spirit, the properly human aspect of the mind, is another word for “intentional consciousness,” which includes operations such as insight, judgment, and responsible decision. Human spirituality and properly human consciousness are one and the same, and thus, spirituality, for Helminiak, does not itself have a religious or divine connotation. Transcendent experience is our experience of our own spiritual capacity to know and love, and cultivating the spiritual life is a matter of attending to and encouraging our drive to be attentive, intelligent, reasonable, and responsible in the quest to know and love.

In Chapter 6, “Theology and Theotics: Union of Creator and Creature,” Helminiak considers God and various ways of understanding what might be meant by the experience of God. He emphasizes that such an experience can only be discerned through faith, not through naturalistic explanation as in neuroscience or psychology. By natural reason, we can affirm a desire to know and love, but not a gifted sharing in God's own life of knowing and loving through the gifts of the indwelling Spirit and the beatific vision (360). Because we are not God, naturalistic disciplines can study the human spirit and transcendent experiences without appealing to religious faith or God.

Helminiak's engagement with so many contemporary thinkers and so much research is impressive. If Lonerganians have a reputation of only talking to themselves, this charge cannot be made of Helminiak, who translates Lonergan into the contemporary context of psychology, neuroscience, and analytic philosophy.

Among the most valuable contributions Helminiak makes to a non‐Lonerganian audience is the importance of introspective self‐inquiry to his anti‐reductionist position. Again, a correct theory of knowledge implies that realities are differentiated “on the basis of intelligibility, not palpability, visibility, or imaginableness” (237–38), and that “when the meanings really differ, the realities are different” (76). But if one is actually to discover the intelligibility/meaning of the mind, distinct from that of the brain, one must inquire into one's own mental life. While studying sense data yields an understanding of the intelligibility/meaning of “neuronal firing” (122), it is only by investigating the data of one's own consciousness that one discovers the laws of the human mind—such as, what it means to be attentive, intelligent, reasonable, and responsible. One is attentive if he or she is truly open to the givenness of experience. One is intelligent if one asks questions, has acts of understanding that organize the data of experience in a possibly correct way, or formulates those insights. One is reasonable if one questions the truth of one's insights and makes judgments of fact because one realizes that the evidence is sufficient, that is, because one has asked and answered all the questions relevant to the truth of one's hypothesis. One is responsible if one asks questions about value and makes decisions on the basis of authentic judgments of value. No empirical investigation of the data of sense can tell us any of this—only self‐knowledge does. This indicates that one is dealing with a reality different from what neuroscientific study of the brain discovers.

This inquiry into the intelligibility of one's own conscious life is also the basis for Helminiak's account of human spirituality, since I can discover in myself the desire to know and love that is the foundation of the spiritual life. This self‐knowledge is also crucial to Helminiak's account of God, because one can discover in oneself an unrestricted desire to know, which anticipates a completely intelligible universe, a key premise in Lonergan's argument for God (345–53).

However, I wonder why this method of self‐inquiry did not lead to an examination of Lonergan's later reflection on the (religious) experience of “unrestricted being‐in‐love,” particularly in Helminiak's discussion in Chapter 5 of transcendent experiences. Helminiak does mention it implicitly in Chapter 6's theological account of “presence to God” and sanctifying grace (6.3), and perhaps this is a key to why it is not given fuller treatment. Helminiak wants to talk about spirituality in a way that can be verified naturalistically, and maybe he thinks this “being‐in‐love” has too many Christian connotations. But perhaps there is a way of phenomenologically investigating one's own state of “being‐in‐love without limits.” Lonergan thinks this would be a source for understanding the Christian doctrine of grace, but if there is such an experience that is open to investigation, there is no reason why it cannot be included in a discourse on spirituality that does not require religious faith as a presupposition. It, too, may be among the intelligible/meaningful realities of the human spirit that self‐inquiry discovers and that are not reducible to the brain.