lack belief vs evidence

Geeze, I go off to have dinner and you guys manage to mess up my Linguistics board with four pages of stuff that should be on the Philosophy board.

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Now I have to straighten all this crap out!

For starters, Sam, what the heck do you mean by "the word lack belief"??? That is two words. Do you mean the three words "lack of belief"? Or do you really mean the verb-object combination "lack of belief"? The way you wrote it makes no sense at all in your sentence.

Aren't you the girl who insisted that I have no right to proofread your posts because you dimiss proper spelling and punctuation as mere "aesthetics" and you proclaim an "intellectual property right" to your own writing the way you write it, no matter how WRONG it is? Here's a perfect example. You've started a thread off with a sentence that makes utterly no sense! Please do not post one more message on this thread until you clear this up!!! What in the holy heck do you mean by the completely garbled phrase, "use the word lack belief to denote lack of evidence." I will delete ALL of your posts until you do so.

This just muddles it further. This board is about LANGUAGE. If you're going to post here, please try to be careful with your LANGUAGE. You wouldn't post on the BIOLOGY board and casually screw up your BIOLOGY and not go back and correct your errors!!!

In any case, you're wrong. I went through all four pages of this INCREDIBLY STUPID THREAD and not one single one of you bothered to look up the DEFINITION of the word "belief." Here it is, you dunderheads:

You guys are confusing FAITH with BELIEF. BELIEF is the word that is called for "especially when based on examination of the evidence"; but there is no REQUIREMENT for evidence to support a belief. ABSENCE OF EVIDENCE IS NOT INCONSISTENT WITH BELIEF.

Belief can be based on faith. As an (amateur) scientist, I BELIEVE in science based on 500 years of EVIDENCE supporting it as an effective system for understanding and predicting the behavior of the natural universe. You BELIEVE in god(s) based on FAITH, despite all lack of EVIDENCE. Both of us BELIEVE, and the word is used correctly in both cases.

I think pretty much the entire rest of this thread is BULLSHIT!

THANK YOU! This thread should be ANYWHERE but on the Linguistics board.

Because IT IS WRONG!!! What's wrong with you guys tonight? Did you all forget the URL for Dictionary.com? If your house was on fire would you stand there yelling, "Help, what's the phone number for 911?" I just posted the definition of the word BELIEF. Lack of evidence does not preclude belief. This free public dictionary definition does not cover the existence of evidence to the contrary, but as scientists we'd have to ask, "How strong is that evidence?" Not all evidence is strong enough to be conclusive.

You can believe something to which there is evidence to the contrary, especially if there is also supporting evidence and scholars are frantically trying to sort it all out. You can even believe something if there's a whole pile of evidence to the contrary and none to support your belief. That would kind of make you a moron, but it's still the BELIEF of a moron.

No no no no no! You owe me one for this, Sam!

Not on the bloody Linguistics board you're not!!!

*sigh* Do I have to do all your homework for you tonight?

A "fact not in evidence" is a legal term, not a philosophical one. It simply means that a witness has presented something as a fact without providing evidence. It doesn't mean that it's not a fact, merely that its factuality has not been established. The whole point is that people "assume facts not in evidence" all the time, AND THEY COULD BE WRONG.