ProgrammingGodJordan
Banned
Highlighting the faults in the logic that you're employing is hardly silly or irrelevant. Logical principles need to be generally true to be valid to employ as an argument, not specially pleaded to be relevant for one case and not others. Doing things like you are is something of a hallmark of the nastier aspects of religion... and quite frankly, I have no intention of inserting religious thinking into my atheism.
Of course it doesn't. Nor was there any attempt to argue that it did. Rather, it was highlighting how you are attempting to grossly and fallaciously misuse that rather trivial fact to try to support a harmful, ignorant, and internally contradictory "understanding."
There are effectively uncountable kinds of liquids that will kill you if you drink them and frequently even if you are near them, and that very possibly includes the overwhelming majority of kinds of liquids. Does that make it any more reasonable or valid to say that liquids are not compatible with the human body? Or, shockingly, could you admit that maybe, just maybe, a more nuanced approach is needed to validly address the issue than to proclaim all liquid to be in opposition to the human body and should thus be removed from the human body?
More specifically, certain kinds of beliefs do oppose science by definition. Trying to overgeneralize that fact into a rejection of all belief, however, is to ignore the nature of what belief actually is and what functions it serves, on top of committing multiple logical fallacies.
And I didn't claim that the weakness necessarily laid with him, though I very strongly suspect that Tyson and I would very quickly agree in a discussion on the topic, when it comes the points that I was actually making. After all, this is very basic stuff that we're talking about and it would surprise me quite a bit if he actually disagreed with a counter to that statement that said "Reality is what's true regardless of what one believes about it. Science is simply the most reliable tool that we have to determine what reality actually is, by far." To draw on a couple of Tyson's quotes myself to further reinforce that, though, given that he's the subject in question, "The Universe is under no obligation to make sense to you." and "Knowing how to think empowers you far beyond those who know only what to think."
Back to your understanding of the matters at hand, though... that does seem to be a place of great weakness. Hence one of the reasons why I pointedly differentiated between belief and faith at the beginning of discussion and why I've been highlighting how the logic that you've been employing is little more than special pleading and overgeneralization.
Hmm? In response to a questioner who was vaguely waffling about different people believing different things, he responded with the claim that science doesn't require one to believe in it for to be true. That is quite true, given that truth is not mutable or dependent upon outside subjective validation to actually be the case. It's also a reference to the fact that the scientific method is all about focusing on the beliefs regarding the best methods to gather and evaluate information rather than on the desired end beliefs. It's about the how, in other words, more than the what. To repeat the quote from earlier for emphasis, "Knowing how to think empowers you far beyond those who know only what to think." That's certainly not a rejection of all kinds of belief, there. A rejection of beliefs based on fallacious logic, perhaps, but not all belief by a long shot.
I shall respond to the least nonsensical portion of your response; the final paragraph above, with a simple question.
If Neil expresses that science is true whether or not one believes in science, why would one bother to believe at all?