The Edge, which normally contains exceptionally interesting and well-reasoned argument, has posted a piece of intellectual tripe of such cognitive incompetence that one wonders how author Jonathan Haidt thinks his way out of bed in the morning.

In the second paragraph, he tells us that “surveys have long showed that religious believers in the United States are happier, healthier, longer-lived, and more generous to charity and to each other than are secular people.” Now this is partly correct based on limited evidence, but Haidt accepts this as an innately truthful statement about the relative merits of atheists versus the religious. He closes, for instance, with this: “Secular folk may have many other virtues, but on one of the least controversial and most objective measures of moral behavior—giving time, money, and blood to help strangers in need—religious people appear to be morally superior to secular folk.”

Which would be interesting if it wasn’t a load of tripe. Here are a few rejoinders. First, almost all the “surveys” are not proper scientific studies and they are almost always undertaken by religious institutions. The most recent survey that had believers all chuffed about how generous they were was performed by the Barna Group, which describes its “ultimate aim” as “to partner with Christian ministries and individuals to be a catalyst in moral and spiritual transformation in the United States.” To put the even-handedness of the Barna Group in context, it ran a nationwide telephone survey of atheists and their attitudes earlier this year, and reported that the one quarter of “no-faith” adults reporting themselves as “deeply spiritual” was surprising. Because, you know, how can spirituality be about anything other than belief in god?

Another recent work, which Haidt references, is Arthur C. Brooks’s Who Really Cares; it has so many flaws (including a strange reluctance to discuss the details of the data despite having the luxury of a whole book to get to it) that it really should not be relied on as evidence for anything about religiosity and charity.

Jonathan Haidt regards as powerful evidence these poorly performed, underpowered, methodologically inept surveys from a single country, carried out under massive conflicts of interest. Meanwhile he ignores counter-examples. For instance, three of the four greatest philanthropists in American history are/were atheists. A recent study confounded its authors’ expectations when it was shown that atheist doctors were more likely to give their time to treating the poor than religious doctors.

And if we leave the personal and look at the national scale, the percentage of GDP given as foreign aid leans massively towards more secular nations. For comparison, Sweden gives away nine times more of its GDP than the United States (0.9% to 0.1%) despite being much less wealthy (GDP per capita $32,200/yr to $44,000/yr). As well as being more generous, secular countries gave most of their aid without “ties” whereas the US gives over 90% of its foreign aid tied to political objectives, such as forcing recipient nations to buy US goods and services in return. On other measures of social well-being than charity, religiosity is strongly associated with poor outcomes. As reported in a 2005 study, “In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy and abortion in the prosperous democracies.”

And then there’s the fact that religious charities are more prone to inefficiency and outright fraud. “A survey by researchers at Villanova University in the USA has found that 85 percent of Roman Catholic dioceses that responded had discovered embezzlement of church funds in the past five years, with 11 percent reporting that more than $500,000 had been stolen.” In the US, most of the charitable donations given by believers goes directly into church coffers, which sometimes redistribute less than 10% of the take on actual charity. I have read commenters claim in all seriousness that evangelical proselytising counts as a charitable use of donations. In short, one could mount an argument that a large share of religious-motivated charity falls into the hands of charlatans, proselytisers, and confidence tricksters who use the cover of their religious beliefs to shield themselves from such secular perversions as accounting.

Jonathan Haidt’s article does not improve from there. I do not have the patience to dissect any more of the article, but suffice to say that he completely misunderstands the problem with group selection (a couple of pointers: group benefits do not require group selection to succeed, a fact that has been known since WD Hamilton’s work on kin selection in 1964; the reason Richard Dawkins did not devote much time to group selection in The God Delusion is that he has discussed it dozens of times in earlier books; the rate of genetic evolution has nothing whatsoever to do with the theoretical viability of group selection; Charles Darwin believed many things that we now know to be wrong, including that heritable characteristics are mixed like paint rather than being handed down as discrete genes, and as such his opinion on group selection should be respected in the context of the knowledge available to him but is no way an argument for or against group selection and to refer to Dawkins “conced[ing]” the point is highly disingenuous). Haidt treats Damasio as a pillar of science where my few encounters with his work on intuition left me decidedly ambivalent towards both his methods and his anti-rational bias. That’s a story for another time, however. And to my utter astonishment, Haidt treats the hypocrisy of fundamentalists as a good thing:

The new atheists assume that believers, particularly fundamentalists, take their sacred texts literally. Yet ethnographies of fundamentalist communities (such as James Ault’s Spirit and Flesh) show that even when people claim to be biblical literalists, they are in fact quite flexible, drawing on the bible selectively—or ignoring it—to justify humane and often quite modern responses to complex social situations.

At this point, Haidt seems to have forgotten that the fundamentalist movement in America does not wear a stern face over a soft heart. The fundamentalist movement has been working to force creationism into biology classes, and not only wants to but has been partly successful in forcing bans on embryonic stem cell research, bans on abortions, bans on sex education in schools, and bans on non-abortifacent contraceptions. In which moral universe is it acceptable to ignore Biblical injunctions against shaving and eating shellfish while using Biblical literalism to justify taking away others’ right to make life-affecting decisions? Following the dictum that some beliefs are so ridiculous that only an educated man could believe them, one can only marvel at the level of absurdity that Haidt will achieve when he becomes a full professor.

None of this is intended to be an attack on religious belief and charity in and of itself. There are many religious charities that have a long track record of wonderful humanitarian effort, and I have given money to Red Cross International and Oxfam without qualm. And, let’s face it, many of the counter-examples I have given above are only marginally more reliable than the data Haidt uses. And, like Haidt, I am no fan of the so-called “bright” movement either. But I am heartily sick of hearing that atheism leads to amorality and/or a lack of social obligation. It’s bad enough hearing it from semi-literate redneck preachers, but it’s tooth-grindingly painful to see the same claim dressed up in a mantle of cruddy research, presented as a fact by an associate professor at a prestigious university, and given room on a respected intellectual website. Whatever Haidt’s motivation, this article perpetuates a false and stigmatic stereotype of atheism by selective misreading of the evidence.

If Haidt really believes in the empirical moral superiority of the religious mind, perhaps he would care to explain why it is that atheists make up 8-16% of the US population, but only 0.2% of its prison population. There are plenty of possible explanations that have nothing to do with actual religiosity. It is possible, for instance, that many atheist prisoners identify themselves as religious in order to accrue benefits and avoid discrimination. But, you know, this is among the most reliable data available. There’s little sampling error as the US Federal Bureau of Prisons collects this data on almost all prisoners and there’s no obvious conflict of interest in the agency collecting the data. And if you’re going to cast a critical eye on the prison data, then why not apply the same scrutiny to the balderdash surveys from evangelical ministries? Being irritated at Dawkins, Harris, and Dennett, no matter how justified, is no excuse for this blarney.