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Re difference between "do not believe that" and "believe that not": Perhaps it is my L1 that prevents me from capturing the difference. But on the other hand I'm not a supporter of strong linguistic relativism. I can understand the difference between the broader and the narrower sense of atheism. If one doesn't believe that ''p'', one thereby doubts that ''p'' but doesn't rule out the possibility that ''p''. One just refuses to endorse the ''argumentum ad ignorantiam''. But if one believes that not ''p'' and is thereby denying even the possibility of ''p'', one is liable to give an account of where such a certainty comes from. I can't dispel the thought that, in this case, "believing" is virtually the same as knowing. Martinus [[Usor:Neander|Neander]] 03:38, 25 Aprilis 2008 (UTC)
: It is (probably) impossible to disprove existential claims except when they are logical impossibilities and when the claims are specific about time and place. In the case of Russell's teapot, ateapotism is a practical and common sense position; we can not know for certain (can we know anything for certain? That is an argument for the scepticism page) that the teapot does not exist, but there is no reason to say it does and the chances of it existing are so slim that we can live are lives as if we were certain; we "know" that it does not exist in the same way that we "know" that elves do not exist. Of course, the teapot is not a perfect analogy here, as it was designed to make another point: that is up to theists, not atheists, to support their claims.
As for "not believe that" and "believe that not", the first is a negative claim about existence and the second a positive one about non-existence. "Not believe that" is often used to mean "believe that not" in English, but when they are contrasted like this there is a definite difference. Someone who is a pure agnostic does not believe that god exists but does not believe that god does not exist; for him/her the two propositions are equally likely and s/he does not believe either. My dog does not believe that and does not believe that not. "Not believe that" would be a 4, 5, 6, 7 or possibly 3 on Dawkins' spectrum of probability (which is very useful for making these distinctions) whilst "believe that not" would only be a 6 or 7. And knowing is different from believing here; someone who knows is a 7 and probably believes that there is a logical impossibility in the idea of god. I would put myself between 6 and 6.5; I believe that the probability of the statement "god does not exist" is significantly greater that 50%: I ''believe'' the statement in the common English sense of the word "believe". Since I do not believe that the probability of the statement being true is 100%, I do not claim to ''know'' (for me the word "know" implies certainty, for some it does not).
I am not sure whether I am making the differences here clear. Well, problems with the meanings of words are quite commonplace in philosophy at the best of times, what with different people disagreeing about the different nuances in different words even when they both speak the same language natively. Perhaps a conversation between an Englishman and a Finn about epistemology as it relates to an article in Latin about atheism is bound to suffer a few mistranslations ;-)
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