Head through the Ideas or Books section of any weekend paper these days and an unquestioned orthodoxy quickly asserts itself from behind the veneer of open-minded enquiry. That orthodoxy is the doctrine of scientific materialism, the belief that the great questions of human existence that have troubled us for millennia have been, or are about to be, answered by science. Why we love, why we hate, why we believe in God: scientists have proven that these seemingly complex yearnings are merely by-products of evolution, genetic coding, and brain chemistry. Case closed.

Questioning this orthodoxy will likely get you laughed out of the smart cocktail set, so one can only imagine the professional and personal risks that Mario Beauregard, a neuroscientist at the Université de Montreal, is running by publishing a book that claims not only that there is scientific evidence for the existence of God and the soul, but that the tenets of scientific materialism are based on bad science and wild speculation.

Beauregard is too good a scientist to claim that he can prove, once and for all, that human beings possess a soul that exists both inside and apart from the material world. The same goes for the existence of God, whether conceived of as the paternalistic deity of monotheistic religion or the more abstract “ground of all being” of Buddhism.

What Beauregard sets out to do in The Spiritual Brain is to demonstrate, through findings from his own research and the work of other scientists and philosophers, that the human brain is far too complex and mysterious to be reduced to, as one theorist so eloquently put it, “a computer made of meat.”

There is obviously a ton of scientific and philosophical ground to be covered when considering these questions, so Beauregard wisely confines himself to a rigorous, objective questioning of neuroscientific conclusions about human consciousness. What he finds is that neuroscience has proven next to nothing about the non-mechanical functions of the brain, and that its conclusions cannot stand up to the hard light of science.

Beauregard is at his best when uncovering the faulty reasoning and buried assumptions in materialist arguments against the claims of religion and mystical states of consciousness. He demonstrates, for instance, that scientists often fail to account for the persistence and wide range of religious experiences in human history, and tend to define religious belief in strictly monotheistic, Western terms. He also shows that there is absolutely no scientific evidence for the widely accepted (among scientific materialists, at least) theory that the conversion experiences of such historical figures as St. Paul and Joan of Arc can be explained by epileptic seizures and/or mental illness.

Beauregard ventures beyond the strict confines of science in one of the best chapters of the book, a debunking of Dr. Michael Persinger’s celebrated experiments over the past few decades on the brain’s temporal lobes, which Persinger claimed could be electrically stimulated to provoke an experience of the divine presence. To test his hypothesis, Persinger developed what became known in science journalism as the God Helmet, a device that fit over the subject’s head and stimulated the frontal lobes.

When Persinger claimed that his test subjects showed an increase in religious experiences while wearing the God Helmet, there was a predictable flood of media reports on how science was one step closer to debunking religion. As Beauregard points out, the experiments were anything but scientific or successful and were later discredited.

Similarly, the compulsion to ascribe all human behaviour to genetics, Beauregard argues, explains the relentless search for the “fat gene” or the “gay gene” or the “monogamy gene.”

Beauregard sometimes relies too heavily on direct quotations from other scientists and thinkers to back up his arguments, making for an occasionally erratic read, but the plethora of outside voices shows just how wide a spectrum of opinion there is on the question of God and the soul, the foot-stamping absolutism of anti-religious polemicists like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens notwithstanding.

And that is where the true importance of Beauregard’s work lies: in demonstrating just how little we know about consciousness and the brain, and how, in spite of the efforts of a group of scientists, the human mind will not be safely contained in a sterile box.

He also reminds readers of what Einstein said: “The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mystical…. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead.”