I don't believe in a lot of the same things you don't believe in. I suspect most believers share the same theological intuitions we do even though they might not explicitly articulate them. At some level, they are perhaps unconsciously competent in living as if the teaching has just got to be much more nuanced than appears on the surface. Whatever the hierarchical cohort happens to be saying on this, that or the other, often even a supermajority of one billion plus catholics seems quite comfortable, resisting infantalization, acting adult-like and enjoying the primacy of their own consciences. Still, I'm with you on the importance of getting this stuff right, so very deliberately took my children aside and told them to forget about hell for all practical purposes (because, as popularly conceived, it's total poppycock). I quit identifying as roman per se but love my catholic faith, resonating much more with anglican and orthodox sensibilities.

Thanks for you reply, JBS. Sorry for my delay. One of the reasons I left the Catholic Church is because it's never been really cleared up whether hell is a place of eternal torment (punishment) or merely a self-chosen estrangement from God. Moreover, even if hell is a state of being where one has chosen their own estrangement it seems to offend justice to say that there can never be a return to your creator if you find out eternity without God is something that you realize is not what you really want. Also, since "universalism" is a minority position and one I think that is condemned (while Balthasar's "reasonable hope" is allowed), I could never bring myself to accept it and it caused much psychological distress. It's difficult for me to believe a person takes their faith seriously who this does not cause significant psychological trauma. To me, from a Catholic perspective anyway, this "reasonable hope" stuff sounds rather blasé for something that to me is incredible serious with eternal consequences. We better get this right, right? I cannot bring myself to genuinely love a God that coerces me with threats of eternal damnation, and Who thought it fit to allow damnation for those who didn't get it right on this temporal plane. To my knowledge this is the majority Catholic position.

I think we're getting hung up on the fact that I am using "definition" in the philosophical sense.

Which philosopher's sense are you using? Philosophers are not of one mind as to what it means to define a word.

a definition is an adequate expression of an essence.

That sounds Aristotelian. I don't believe in essences, or in a lot of other things that Aristotle talked about.

I think we're getting hung up on the fact that I am using "definition" in the philosophical sense. To define something is not just to promulgate some true statement about something that distinguishes that something from something else; a definition is an adequate expression of an essence.

Thus, it is no more a definition of God in the strict sense to say that God is the cause of all finite being than it is to say that in God the transcendentals coincide, or that God lacks a real distinction of essence and existence.

In any event, it's incorrect (or at least highly tendentious) to say that only words have definitions. There is a distinction between nominal and real definitions.

I receive your self-description as done in good faith.

Of course, we may or may not have an impasse re: below:

"The only epistemological impoverishment for which I plead 'Guilty, your Honour' is religious faith. Faith is a failed epistemology."

As we move forward, dialogically, it should become clearer (despite my dense prose and jargon, I hope), that I conceive of faith as an existential leap, normatively justifiable even when not robustly warranted, epistemically. It's what we do, interpretively, AFTER our best epistemology has failed us, descriptively.

Yet I and a friend can look from a distance and disagree whether some snake is a copperhead or a rattlesnake while agreeing that it exists. We would agree that the creature exists, while differing on its definition

You are not disagreeing about its definition. You are disagreeing about its identity. Definitions apply to words, not to their referents. You have an agreed referent: that snake you both see. You disagree about which word correctly identifies the referent.

But of course, theists of whatever background believe in a causal relationship between God and everything else.

If they say so, then "the cause of everything" is their definition of God. If they also say they are not defining God, then they contradict themselves.

You originally said: "When people tell me that God cannot be defined, they never say anything else about him that, to me, distinguishes him from nothing at all."

But of course, theists of whatever background believe in a causal relationship between God and everything else. If something is a cause, it's obviously not nothing.

And you're just reasserting your claim that to refer to a thing, one must define that thing. Yet I and a friend can look from a distance and disagree whether some snake is a copperhead or a rattlesnake while agreeing that it exists. We would agree that the creature exists, while differing on its definition (i.e., on how to accurately say what specific kind of thing it is).

If your claim is true, we either wouldn't be referring to the same object, or else there would be no difference between the definition of a rattlesnake or a copperhead. Either option is absurd.

I'll just reiterate the point that no philosopher of language that I know of would hold to this position. One hardly needs to read Frege's "Sense and Reference" to see how quickly that claim turns into a reductio.

You seem to be saying that there must be a commonly understood sense to the words we use when we communicate.

I neither said nor intended to say anything about common understanding. When two people are talking to one another, the only understanding that matters in the context of their conversation is their own. In that context, as long as each knows what the other means, it makes no difference whether anybody else knows.

Has no Christian ever mentioned to you that they believe God is the cause of the universe?

Sure, But they cannot then also say, coherently, that God cannot be defined.