I never said all atheists are as in-depth in their reasoning as Tyson. Indeed, I would say most people are not, regardless of world-view. His is one of those unique intellects that only come around every so often. Remember that not all atheists are rational or scientific: 99% of Buddhists are atheists, many Hindus are, and a great many 'new age' types. Atheism does not mean 'not religious' and it doesn't 'secular' or 'scientific'; it only describes a lack of belief in something (namely, a deity), and absolutely nothing else about what they do believe in, just as 'asantaclausism' (if it were a word) would only describe a lack of belief in Santa. From my perspective, the only difference in these two positions is the wider social relevance of God as opposed to Santa: they're both imaginary beings with zero evidence for their existence.

"Independent thought was given to us as a tool to solve and to create, not to be controlled and rendered to having only a conformist's way of thinking."

Aside from the unqualified assumption that thought was 'given' by anything, I thoroughly agree with this, 100%. But this is *exactly* how I arrived at my secular worldview: using independent thought (with no regard for conformism or tradition) applied systematically and rationally to the world around us. And where this brings us, on this issue at least, is that there is not a single SHRED of evidence to validate the existence of a deity, whether Odin, Krishna, Allah, Jupiter, Ra, Huitzilopochtli, or Yahweh.

Religion is fundamentally opposed to science, and science has nothing to say on anything outside of what can be known, so seeing as the god hypothesis -any god removed from nature- is not falsifiable, and so is an invalid hypothesis.

I have no problem if you want to take comfort in your faith; just don't involve science. Science professors never placed priests under house arrest for 'blasphemy' like the pope did with Galileo; scientists don't demand that religious folks preach evolution in their churches like religious folks try to put their faith in the science classroom; science never stunted the development of faith by force, while religion did (and continues to do) exactly that to science.

With that in mind, we can also compare the issues of contention *within* the two philosophies (Reason and Faith) and the logical consequences of following either, for example: you never hear on the news of 'agnostic rebels attacking the atheist stronghold', but you often hear of one religious group attacking another. The reason is that two people with differing notions of existence based in faith can only say "my god is real" so many times, but they can't ever demonstrate this, so the only option is to either 'agree to disagree' or use violence to impose their views on someone else. Two or more folks whose views are based in reason having a disagreement over some fundamental aspect of existence can eventually come to a solution because their views can be proven and disproved.

Bottom line: Scientists might disagree on issues, certainly, but string theory advocates never fly planes into the labs of loop quantum gravity advocates, and Lamarckian biologists didn't fight brutal insurrections against Darwinian ones; never was there a Saint Newton's Day Massacre.

Thanks! Tyson is always my go-to-guy for a good dose of reason.

Absolutely, but some more than others, and religion is one of the biggest inhibitory influences on human social evolution.