It is quite often claimed that the ills that religion brings outweigh any good that it might do. This year, provocatively, The Guardian decided to mark Christmas by slapping precisely this claim across its front page. “Religion Does More Harm Than Good - Poll” was the headline as people across the country geared up to celebrate God becoming incarnate.

Of course, all polls have their problems. For a start, they are better as guides to public opinion than as guides to the facts (the appeal to popularity is a fallacy, remember). Then there are all of the difficulties involved in getting a representative sample of a sufficient size to be meaningful, and formulating questions that don’t have too much of a distorting effect on people’s answers.

The biggest problem with the article in The Guardian, however, is that the poll simply didn’t say what The Guardian said it did; they misrepresented the data.

The survey reported that 82% of those asked see religion as a source of tension. There is a big difference, however, between saying that a thing is a source of tension and saying that it does more harm than good. FA Cup finals are a source of tension. General elections are a source of tension. A-levels are a source of tension. That doesn’t mean that these things do more harm than good.

It may well be that most of the 82% who see religion as a source of tension also believe that tension to be trivial in comparison with the great goods that religion brings. That is, it is perfectly possible to answer “yes” to the question in the poll without endorsing The Guardian’s headline claim.

Thankfully, The Guardian didn’t make its case just on the 82% who see religion as a source of tension; they made a comparison with the 57% who said that religion is a force for good: “an overwhelming majority see religion as a cause of division and tension - greatly outnumbering the smaller majority who also believe that it can be a force for good.” (Note the subtle manipulation here; 57% said that religion is a force for good, but The Guardian weakened this to “can be a force for good.”)

The idea, then, is that because more people said that religion is a source of tension than said it is a force for good, the poll supports the idea that religion does more harm than good.

Presumably this is because to get these figures there must be some people who think that religion does some harm but no good (and so that it does more harm than good). But consider the figures carefully. What is the greatest possible number of people who did say that religion does harm but didn’t say it does good? 43%. A minority.

That means that for the poll to support the idea that religion does more harm than good, it must be assumed that a significant number of those who said that religion is both a source of tension and a force for good think that all things considered religion does more harm than good. Now that may be the case, but that’s a pretty strong assumption. Describing something as a “force for good” sounds a lot like saying “all things considered it does more good than harm”, whereas describing it as “a source of tension” sounds nothing like saying “all things considered it does more harm than good.”

The data simply don’t yield The Guardian’s headline claim. The Guardian, perhaps to try to cause a stir at Christmas, was putting words in people’s mouths.

One of the phenomena that opponents of religion have to explain is religious experience. If God does not exist, then why do so many people claim to have experienced him directly?

One possible explanation of widespread religious experience is the existence of a “God-Spot” in the brain. There is a theory that just as there is a particular part of the brain responsible for pain, and a particular part of the brain responsible for emotion, so there is a particular part of the brain responsible for experiences of God. According to this theory, our brains are so constituted that they can cause religious experiences whether there’s a god out there or not.

If this is correct, then people having experiences of God doesn’t prove that he exists; an alternative, naturalistic explanation of religious experience can be given.

Scientists from the University of Montreal have claimed to have disproved this theory. They took a group of nuns, and asked them to describe their mystical experiences. As the nuns did this, their brains were monitored to see if there was a peak in activity in any particular part of it. There wasn’t. The scientists concluded that there is no God-spot in the brain.

If this account of the experiment, which is based on that given by BBC News, is accurate, then the scientists have made a fairly basic error. The observational data that they collected simply does not support the inference that they are reported to have drawn.

If we wanted to locate the pain-centres in the brain, we would not measure the brain-activity of someone remembering a time when they were in pain, or describing what pain feels like. We would measure the brain-activity of someone who we were jabbing on the hand with a pin (or something similar), someone who was actually experiencing pain.

Similarly, to find out whether a particular part of the brain is associated with religious experiences, one would have to measure the brain-activity of someone having a religious experience. Measuring the brain-activity of someone describing a religious experience is not the same thing.

If we take the BBC News report at face value, this seems to be a case of misrepresenting the data. Perhaps there is more to the study than made it into the report. Perhaps the scientists’ findings have been misrepresented, or they have offered some explanation of why brain-activity in someone describing a religious experience is a good guide to brain-activity in someone having a religious experience. I hope so.

As it has been reported, though, there is a massive gap between the research and the inference drawn. The evidence given in the BBC article simply doesn’t support the conclusion that it is supposed to.