That's sort of true, but misses my point. I'll try to be clearer. Such questions are commonly used as rhetorical weapons, so if you don't mean them that way, it's incumbent on you to make the distinction.

In this case that might mean (a) providing enough information to explain why escalating the question is necessary to the discussion, as opposed to a closet insult, and (b) using impersonal language. For example, you already changed your wording from "do you know what science is" to "what is science". That's a big difference.