EVERYTHING! You claim that it is perfectly natural for humans to be theists.
Apes are our closest cousins, on Earth. If your claim has any merit? Then apes must also be theists.
If apes are not theists? Then? Your claim theism is natural? Is fully, completely and thoroughly debunked as false.
THAT is what apes have to do with it.
Hmm... To play advocate of the devil here for a second... In his defense, he did say "the default
human condition" in several posts. And where the word "human" was ommitted, I think we should assume that that is what he means - after all, he believes humans are a "special" type of ape. Although it wouldn't surprise me that he's a creationist who wouldn't call humans "apes".
Having said that, there is
some truth to what he says, but not exactly like he thinks it is the case... in fact, the reality of the matter is actually quite devastating to his case....
Humans tend to be religious, yes. But why? What are the underlying reasons for that? And how, if any, does this manifest in other animals?
The answer turns out to be quite simple...................
ALL animals (some more then others) have a tendency to engage in Type 1 cognition errors. This is "the false positive". That cognition error is also combined with a tendency to infuse agency into seemingly random events.
So what does this tendency result in? Answer:
superstition.
Yes, animals get superstitious. It results in so-called "magical thinking". It results in concluding patterns, where there are no patterns. There's a famous pigeon experiment which illustrates this nicely.. In a nutshell: pigeons are put in cages. At random moments, food is dropped in the cage. After a while, the pigeons were acting very weird. All of them developed "superstitious" beliefs concerning how to trigger the food dropping.
The food drops while a pigeon happened to be flapping his wings. Now the pigeon thinks that flapping his wings, makes food drop. So the pigeon starts to frantically flap its wings. It "forgets" the many times it fails and when food drops randomly, the pigeon incorrectly concludes that his wing flapping caused it ( = the false positive).
Another pigeon was rotating on its own axis.
Another pigeon was stomping its feet.
etc etc
All of them "found" patterns, that were never there.
This likely is a survival mechanism.
The cliché idea is: you are a primitive humanoid ape on africa and you hear a rustle in the bushes. is it the wind, or is it a dangerous predator? (= infusing agency; "they are out the get me!").
Those who stand around to "gather more evidence" are lunch if it does in fact consist of a predator.
Those who engage in the false positive and assume that it's a predator out to get them, run away. If it turns out that it was in fact a predator - they survive. If not, no harm done.
THAT is what religion really is.
A gigantic Type 1 cognition error with infused agency.