I may as well admit that I haven't read all of Steven Pinker's new book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, but quite enough of it to see that the mixture is the same as in his previous bestsellers – a great piece of theatre in which half-truths do battle with straw men while the reader watches in safety, defended by barricades of apparent fact against any danger of actual thought.

The whole trick depends on sustaining the illusion that only what's under the lighting exists. The index here, for example, contains three entries for Columbine high school, and none whatsoever for Christianity.

Whether or not you suppose Christian myth to be true, it is simply impossible to consider the development of ethical thought and practice in the west without understanding that almost all of it has been Christian, and that what comes after Christianity is itself incomprehensible without it.

It would not be true to say that religion is never mentioned, but it is in the context of an idiotically whiggish view of history. We learn from his opening piece in this series that "the philosophers of the Enlightenment extolled the way novels engaged a reader's identification with and sympathetic concern for others … The clergy, of course, denounced these novels and placed several on the Index of Forbidden Books" – which accounts very nicely for the atheism of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, and also explains why Jane Austen was burned at the stake.

But maybe that's just an opinion. Let's take some of his unequivocally factual sentences, such as this one (illustrated by a graph, so it must be science) – discussing the progress of wars since 1945, he writes:

"Wars in which a great power tried to hang on to a colony could be extremely destructive, such as France's attempts to retain Vietnam between 1946 and 1954 (375,000 battle deaths) and Algeria between 1954 and 1962 (182,500 battle deaths). After what has been called 'the greatest transfer of power in world history' this kind of war no longer exists."

This news must come as a relief to the inhabitants of Iraq.

Soon they will wake up and be reunited with their loved ones in the discovery that the last 10 years have all been a bad dream of a kind of war that no longer exists.

What about the second Vietnam war, you know, the one that Rambo fought in? That cost, he says, 1.6m battle deaths. But it is briskly redefined as "a war between states". It's not colonialism when Americans do it, you see.

All right, perhaps Pinker can recognise a colonial war when it is fought by non-Americans. But no, Russia's war in Afghanistan, (435,000 battle deaths) is redefined as "a Russian-bolstered civil war". In fact, quite obviously, all prolonged colonial wars are also civil wars, and almost all of them have foreign involvement on the insurgent side as well. Certainly the American war of independence had both. But his whole grand scheme is held together by labelling games of this sort.

I didn't comb through the book to find mistakes. I just opened it at random a few times and looked for references to subjects I know something about. It wasn't hard. His range is wide. But the factual errors, although they destroy his thesis as a serious piece of history, point up its attractive weakness as a comfort blanket for the smug.

In his earlier works, Pinker was a great populariser of the just-so stories of evolutionary psychology; in this, he has moved on from prehistory to give an account of history, which is still stitched together from just-so stories, but this time illustrated with graphs, and lots of numbers. This kind of thing tends to impress arts graduates. But it's still just a bedtime story and the only serious conclusion to draw from Pinker's work is that a culture that regards him as a great intellectual is one already in serious crisis.