Neil Degrasse Tyson

[Confused Ape]

You do realise that even by using the definition you are using (which I wouldn't recommend, I'd suggest Oxford English dictionary, it's far more universally accepted and less wishy washy), it doesn't even make it incompatible with atheism nor does it justify in any way your assertion that NDT is not an atheist.

It's not my definition. William Rowe is a philosopher and that's his definition.  I quoted it because he's saying that people who disbelieve there's a God are no more rational than people who believe there is a God.  This goes further than the online Oxford Dictionary which just says - "A person who believes that nothing is known or can be known of the existence or nature of God."  I thought that an interesting point of view.

"agnosticism is the view that human reason is incapable of providing sufficient rational grounds to justify either the belief that God exists or the belief that God does not exist"

So your definition, my definition, any definition, does absolutely nothing to suggest that NDT cannot hold these views and also lack belief. And anyone with a grain of intellectual honesty knows NDT lacks belief in gods, that's evident in everything he's ever written and said. He's quite famous for saying that science and belief are incompatible, for example. If this doesn't strongly suggest that he disbelieves in gods (which by definition, is atheism), then I don't know what does. 

What we do know from that video is that NDT disagrees with atheists who claim that all agnostics are really atheists. He's also based his definition on what Thomas Henry Huxley said.

The neuroscientist, Ramachandran, doesn't class himself as an atheist even though he doesn't believe in a personal God.

That's all nice and rosy but it doesn't make a blind bit of difference to anything here and it's actually, completely irrelevant.

I quoted Ramachandran to show his idea of what being an agnostic is. He doesn't believe in a personal God but is agnostic about some of the Hindu deities. This suggests that individual agnostics mightn't see themselves exactly as philosophers and dictionaries say they should

You need to really understand the word 'atheist'.

Maybe NDT is confused about the real meaning of the word 'atheist'.  After all, a lot of people in the now defunct Richard Dawkins forum believed that atheism is some kind of ideology full of shoulds and oughts and missions such as stamping out religion.

If you do that, then to argue that NDT is not one, you have to demonstrate that he actively believes in a god. Good luck with that. 

Maybe he just thinks that the existence of some kind of deity is impossible to prove or disprove so he doesn't want to be bothered with the question. We'll never really know unless somebody from this forum emails him and asks him to provide exact details of his views.  All we can be certain of is that he'd be very annoyed if the email included the statement that he's actually an atheist.

Likewise it's not possible to both believe and disbelieve at the same time.

Here's a video which raises questions about the human brain.  Maybe there are people who are literally in two minds about the existence of some kind of deity but their hemispheres can't be questioned separately unless their brains are split.