A Question From Atheists

[The Grand Nudger]

What I can do, and have done, is negate an equivocation...because it's an equivocation.

I think I understand your position, but I hold a different position: words are not necessarily definite, they do not necessarily refer to something specific.

Then you don't actually hold a different position..you simply accept equivocation because you think that words are indefinite....but much more likely because it's convenient to your argument.  If I told you that a fork was a spoon...you wouldn't say "Yeah, legit, cuz I mean words are vague and stuff"..now would you? If a diabetic asked for his insulin, it would be important that you didn't grab a syringe full of coca-cola...huh?

It's completely ok for words to be ambiguous and indefinite, in fact this is the very nature of language.

It's not completely ok in a coherent thought, however.  It's simply a textbook no-no and that's what made it so easy to negate what you thought couldn't be negated.

The formal language like the one used in mathematics in definite and clear but it's certainly not the case with natural language. A word in natural language  can refer to things that are vastly different. This topic is very well investigated in the study of languages. A title that comes to my mind is Wittgenstein's Tractatus which advocates these points. There is even a part where Wittgenstein discusses the word God and shows the ambiguity of this word and concludes that attempts to argue about god are usually determined to be failures due to indefinite and ambiguous nature of the word.

Natural language does contain ambiguity, but it's our responsibility to make sure that, despite those ambiguities, we are communicating what we wih to express as accurately as possible.  Allowing a word to mean nothing or all things makes that impossible.  Let;s try an example. "What do you think about, like, the universe, man?" What, exactly, am I asking you there? Does it have anything to do with a god? How about this? "What is your opinion on fleezledrats?" What's that, you might ask? Oh, just a word that might mean nothing in particular.

In the case of pantheism, for example, it doesn't matter that they call the universe a god, because what they;re talking about when they say god and what I;m talking about when I say god simply aren't the same thing.  We could bog it down in semantics from now until eternity but there will never be a point at which that's not true.  No matter what a pantheist calls the universe, or god...we're just not having the same conversation.  

I'm not well-versed in the study of languages and I prefer not to discuss this point further. I think it's natural and inevitable to have ambiguity in language and you believe otherwise.

It's not a language issue, it's a logic issue...equivocation. Are you well versed in logic?  I ask, because now you're pitching straw about some fish - in defense of equivocation.

You quoted from a dictionary, it scratches the surface of the definitions of the word, if you want to make the definitions complete you must add this to it also:

[color=#222222]Pantheism holds that God is the universe and the universe is God

I picked this sentence up from the Wikipedia page on God. 

No, -I- mustn't..because that's not consistent with the other definition and that other definition is what -I- am referring to when I speak of gods.  I do not believe in gods, and further, I do not believe that the universe possesses the attributes assigned -to- those gods. I'm capable of making much more precise distinctions, and without precise distinctions we will invariably arrive at imprecise conclusions.