I’ve recently been debating with some guy online about what should be believed, and when are you justified in believing something. It was a version of the classic “you can’t prove god doesn’t exist” arguments. He used this rather strange interpretation of the Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment, to argue that, since you have no evidence for the existence of something and also no evidence against the existence of something, you should therefore believe both. But I think you wouldn’t even need an experiment as complicated as Schrödinger’s cat to contemplate this:

Let’s say you hide a coin in one of your hands and ask me: “Which hand do you believe the coin is in?”
Based on his logic, I would have to answer “both.” Of course, I think that’s impossible. In practice I would say “I don’t know.” But I think the proper answer to this question, since we are talking about belief, would have to be “neither.” To illustrate why this is correct, let’s brake down the question:

“Do you believe the coin is in the right hand?” The answer to this question would be “no.”
“Do you believe the coin is in the left hand?” The answer in this case would also be “no.”

This is because I am not justified in believing any of the above. At the same time, if we flip the questions into “Do you believe the coin is not in the left/right hand?”, the answers to both of these would also have to be “no.”

The main problem is that people often confuse two phrases: “I don’t believe it’s true” and “I believe it’s not true.” While they superficially look the same, there is one important difference. When you accept a statement (as in “I believe it’s not true”), you have actually evaluated it - for this you need good reasons since you need some basis for that evaluation. But in the case of “I don’t believe it’s true”, all you have done is rejected the claim - you haven’t even evaluated it, because you have nothing to base that evaluation on (no evidence).

Now let’s see how this is relevant in the case of atheism. If we define god as the God of the bible, I would have to say I actually believe god doesn’t exist, since I feel that there’s actually evidence against the existence of that specific god - here my atheism could be defined as “a belief that there is no god”, which is so frequently used by theists to aid in the shifting of burden of proof. But if we define god in a more vague, deist kind of way, the answer to the question “Do you believe there is no god?”, I would have to answer “no.” In this case, I would fall into the “lack of belief in god” type of atheism. I also think all agnostics would fall into that definition of atheism, but I’ll elaborate on that some other time.