THWOTH wrote:This framing of atheism as a 'lack of' is more trouble than it's worth. Not having cancer doesn't mean I lack cancer - not having an adequate or sufficient amount of something - it just means I don't have it.

Lack = the state of not having enough of something or being without it, i.e. you don't have it.

I think it's more subtle. In common language, to lack something is used to mean that you haven't got something that you would prefer to have, or would normally expect to have. I lack money, certainly, in the sense that it would be great to have a bit more of it; I don't lack golf clubs, in that sense, even though I don't own any: I have no use for them and therefore don't "lack" them.

In general cases of use, I don't personally ever use it to mean 'I have insufficient of X', although I acknowledge it does carry that meaning too. I don't have enough milk to make coffee - not I lack milk. I only ever use it to mean 'without'. That's why I think it suits well with respect to my position on gods - it's not that I have insufficient belief in gods, like just a smidge more and I'd be a believer, it's that I have zero belief in them; an absence of belief.

And this is why language is not an exact science.

Languology


ETA: and of course, I then had to search that word and found this opaque but somehow amusing snippet

Joke? Funny!? Langualogy is serious business. Deadly serious, in fact. Professor Bikerton lost an eye, an ear, two fingers and three colleagues while escaping from the Linguistics Department of the Upwind Community College, Hawaii. The Languologists stood by and did nothing, watching a Phlegmaticist and two Faunologists get mowed down in their prime by a madman with a verb particle beam. Darn you, sir. Darn you straight to Heck!

What a slimy, emetic person.

You're only saying that because you don't like golf.

As well as being a super-creepy Bible-shit peddler, he's a crap golfer. That swing is like someone shovelling cow-dung into the back of a truck.

Which, when you come to think of it, is an apt metaphor.

THWOTH wrote:This framing of atheism as a 'lack of' is more trouble than it's worth. Not having cancer doesn't mean I lack cancer - not having an adequate or sufficient amount of something - it just means I don't have it.

Yeah, the whole expression of negative existence is a problem that is baked into language. Many languages have a funky, non-regular way to express negation in general and negative existence in particular.

In English, for example, stating existence divides neatly between singular and plural...

There is a (...)
There are (...)s

Pretty simple, right? But when we come to negative existence, not only does the singular/plural distinction still hold (yes, we can have singular zero and plural zero, as counter-intuitive as it seems) but we have variant ways to express these.

Singular zero

There isn't a (...)
There is no (...)

Plural zero

There aren't any (...)s
There are no (...)s

This is endlessly baffling to my Japanese students (no plurals in Japanese) and my Ukrainian students similarly struggle with expressing zero existence in English. (I'm doing research on these forms at the moment and trying to tease out from corpus data if they are used in specific contexts.) For singular negative existential expressions, what you are saying is that the number of X that exists is zero, and that stands in some kind of opposition to the expected number of one.

'There's no class next week. It's the school festival. (A once-a-week class is cancelled next week)

For plural negation, we are saying that the number is zero in opposition to a plurality.

There are no classes in August. It's the summer holidays. (A class that occurs four times a month is cancelled for the whole month.)

I found this quote that I think illustrates some of the problems that expressions of atheism have on an ontological level.

Givon (2002, p. 372) states that negative assertion is “a distinct speech act, used with different communicative goals in mind than affirmative assertions. In using a negative assertion, the speaker is not in the business of communicating new
information to the hearer. Rather, s/he is in the business of correcting the hearer’s misguided belief.”

As we see with the English negative existentials, there is some kind of washback from the positive assertion- forcing a singular or plural value to zero. We are saying something like negation is a second step, a dependent concept based on the primary concept of existence; a reaction based on a prior assertion.

The verb 'lack' seems to me to be similarly based on the idea that the expected, desired, preferred, usually extant thing is missing, that we are in a state of deficit, and that there must therefore be a 'gap' of some sort, a hole to be filled, an equation to be completed.

Reference:

Givón, Talmy. 2001. Syntax Vol.1. John Benjamins Publishing.

Fab post dgms! Cheers

Atheism
"I don't believe God exists"
weak, negative, implicit, agnostic

"I believe God does not exist"
strong, positive, explicit, gnostic

When people are referring to "atheism" it does not hurt to be clear to the flavour they are referring to.(to which they are referring )