Another species isn't necessary. You simply have to acknowledge that like the dog and calculus, there are vasts amount of things you are not capable of understanding logically.
Unless you believe we are supremely intelligent and no other thing in the universe has reached out level of understanding.
I would have no issue with this. Bacteria can't even think on a level like we can; they don't have the physiological structures necessary for it.
But it’s Dawkins who is lazy. Cowardly. How easy is it to stand behind only that which can be demonstrably proven? If I say water boils at 100 degrees, does that make me a courageous thinker? No, because I’m absolutely confident anyone who turns on their stove would find me right.
So we accept that there is a border region, with knowledge, a gray area were fewer and fewer humans can understand. And eventually nobody can ever understand.
Religion and philosophy attempt to move beyond that frontier. Not to provide absolute answers, always, but to try to understand in broad strokes what is beyond our capability to know.
"This concept is beyond our capability to know." And then they proceed to explain how it works:|, right until it starts to smack into the hard boundaries of reality. "Ok, well this is the boundary of how much we know about things we can't understand."
If we are not to stand behind evidence and proof, then what do we have? Blind faith? Believing that for which we have no good reason to? What is the distinction between that and basic insanity? Every action we engage in is based on hard evidence, including even the simplest of activities, such as moving about without crashing into walls. That cowardly evidence from experience says that you're going to get hurt if you walk into something, or fail to move your legs in a way that keeps you upright. All the faith in the world won't let you float to work, ignoring gravity and physical laws. Sure, you can do some mental tricks to
think that you've floated, but then we're back at that "insanity" thing again.
Philosophy can muse on the idea of, "Ok, so we're here now. Huh. Well how 'bout that." Religion often serves to institutionalize these musings, all too often with excessive zeal, and almost invariably littered with the supernatural.
Philosophy can ponder the "whys" without the requirement of some other guiding force. Again, if there is this guiding force, it's either outside of our capability to measure it by
any means, which starts to point away from evidence for its existence (if it can affect us, the effect has the potential to be measurable by the simple fact of its effects), or it is
so far beyond us that, like the bacteria, it's not something we're anywhere close to perceiving.
I guess the question then: A bacterium perceives a human, on some level. But
how can it perceive us? Would it perceive us as we perceive a galaxy? Just another natural thing that does its thing? It doesn't have the ability to think of itself as a living thing, or as any kind of anything. But it can still interact with us chemically, and simply as a place to exist.
Even then though, the human it lives in is still not a god or supernatural entity. It's just a life form of a different sort.
Or let's say that there's some extraterrestrial life form out there, advanced many millions of years beyond us. I can see that as possible. It's a damn big, damn old Universe, and I think it's nuts to say that this planet is the only instance of life developing. But this life form is
still not supernatural. It's just more advanced.
(I don't even care for the term "supernatural." So it's outside of nature? Wouldn't that just mean that our previous definition of "nature" was incorrect, and thus expands automatically to include the newly-discovered "stuff?")
I'll also make a distinction between "faith" and "blind faith."
One uses that darned cowardly evidence. The other doesn't.
I could say that I have faith that I can give someone $10 and be able to get something of value back. "Backed by the full faith and credit of the United States government." And they of course have faith that that cheap piece of paper will still retain some value. But there's evidence to support that faith. So calling it "faith" comes with some backing.
Love often gets brought up as well as some sort of "higher" thing. Welcome to Mammal Bonding Behavior 101. Yeah, we do the same things, just with a bigger brain behind it all.
So how do you know that someone loves you back? Magic? Or is it in fact a function of the sizable body of evidence you've got that's based on their behavior towards you? And as we see by humanity's long,
long history with relationship problems, that faith often gets misplaced, which occurs when evidence is not seen, not available, not understood, or not acknowledged. Once again, "faith" carries evidence.
Blind faith throws away that tether. I don't know what you're left with then, but it's not something I'd want to use as a foundation for anything.
Dogs are not "logical," and there will not exist something "more logical" than humans. Logic itself is a human language. You are abusing logic by trying to draw conclusions from inappropriate applications of it.
They can still follow their own reasoning though, limited as it is.
Logic is something of a language, yes. Same with mathematics. (Just illustrating a point here...) Some people say that it's
amazing that math just happens to match the way the Universe works. But, of course, they've looked at it backwards. The Universe works the way it does. Math is a language for describing its behavior. Pi is 3.14159.... That wasn't some miraculous coincidence that we came up with that number. That's an inherent property of circles in this Universe. We simply wrote it down for future reference, a placeholder, so that we wouldn't need to draw a circle and figure it all out again every single time it was needed.
Logic can allow ideas to remain sorted and organized. "This and this and this, therefore this." It's mathematics for non-numeric concepts. A dog can behave by its logic, as best as it can. But just like us, its behavior doesn't always need to
listen to the logic. "Chew on sofa, and get punishment. But chewing is fun!" Though even that...is that logical? Evaluate the action and the consequences, and make a choice. Or even failing to evaluate consequences and choosing an action anyway - there's still a thought process that went on there.
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