First, animal responses to death show striking similarities to how humans religiously respond to death. For instance, magpies, gorillas, elephants, llamas, foxes, and wolves all use ritual to cope with the death of a companion. Magpies will peck the dead body and then lay blades of grass next to it. Gorillas hold something so similar to a “wake” that many zoos have formalized the ritual. Elephants hold large “funeral” gatherings and treat the bones of their deceased with great respect. Llamas utilize stillness to mourn for their dead. Foxes bury their dead completely, as do wolves, who, if they lose a mate, will often go without sex and seek solitude. In all of these cases, the animals rely on ritual to ease the pain of death. Even if one will not grant their rituals the title “religious,” at the very least the overlap between animal and human death rituals stands out as striking.

Second, primates respond to what appears to be the “awe” of nature in ways that could be described as “religious.” The chimpanzees of Gombe “dance” at the base of an enormous waterfall in the Kakombe Valley. This “dance” moves slowly and rhythmically alongside the riverbed. The chimps transition into throwing giant rocks and branches, and then hanging on vines over the stream until the vines verge on snapping. Their “dance” lasts for ten minutes or longer. For humans, this waterfall certainly instills awe and majesty. Obviously, no one can know the internal processes of a chimpanzee. That said, given the champanzees’ reaction to the waterfall and their evolutionary nearness to humans, it is not far-fetched to think that they too may experience feelings of awe when they encounter that waterfall.

People like Dawkins, says de Waal, are going about things in the wrong manner. “The question is not so much whether religion is true or false,” he writes, “but how it shapes our lives, and what might possibly take its place if we were to get rid of it the way an Aztec priest rips the beating heart out of a virgin.” What this violent metaphor is meant to gesture towards is “the gaping hole” that would be left by “the removed organ’s functions.” It seems to suggest that religion is some serviceable physiological element in the human body politic.

But de Waal isn’t really trying to “save” religion from atheists like Dawkins; there’s much about religion that de Waal finds troubling and problematic. The big targets for de Waal are what he calls “top down morality” and human exceptionalism. Top down morality is linked to the assertion that morality comes to human life from somewhere “on high,” which might be taken to mean that human life receives its morality from a transcendent, out-of-this-world, divine.

But de Waal notes that top down morality isn’t a purely religious problem. He attacks, for example, the philosophical presumption mentioned earlier, that morality is a matter of reasoning—that we reason our way “up” to moral action or decision. Likewise, de Waal takes issue with human exceptionalism—the idea that morality is something that only humans are capable of—regardless of its origin. Religion is a target, for de Waal, to the extent that it supports each of these presumptions.