θειότης denotes the divine quality or attribute itself, perceived in or through what’s been made - fair correction on that specific point. It doesn’t change what the line was doing, though. Whatever θειότης ultimately denotes, and you may be right that it’s incoherent, that’s a separate question from whether Zeus has the qualities that actually marked something as a god to the Greeks in the first place.
Different failure modes, and those examples were never circular to begin with, so they were never carrying a circular definition on their own. That point wasn’t doing the work for circularity anyway, circularity got a direct answer in the same post: the omni-properties definition and Anselm’s, neither of which defines god in terms of itself, divine, spirit, or supernatural. The energy/species point was answering a narrower claim, that ambiguity or incompleteness at the edges disqualifies a term from serious use, which is exactly what those fields disprove every day. Two different jobs, two different paragraphs, both still standing.
That’s the list growing again. God, divine, supernatural, spirit got named and cleared. Now it’s good and everything too, added once the first set was met.
Extrapolating a graded property to its limiting case isn’t unique to theology, and it doesn’t strip a term of its referent. Science runs on exactly this move: a frictionless surface is “low friction” pushed all the way to zero, an ideal gas is real-gas behavior pushed to its limiting case, absolute zero is “cold” pushed to its theoretical limit. None of those lack a clear referent just because they’re unreachable; the limiting case is the referent, even if nothing physical sits exactly on it. Predictions get derived from them, and nobody waits for a real frictionless surface before letting the concept into a textbook.
“Knows everything” works the same way: for every true proposition, this being knows it; for every false one, it doesn’t believe it. “Can do anything logically possible” is the same shape: for every state of affairs that isn’t a contradiction in terms, this being can bring it about. Neither requires anyone to enumerate every true proposition, any more than “no largest prime” requires someone to list the primes; the predicate is determinate, our ability to check it by hand is a separate question. “Good” follows the same structure: “perfectly good” means acting, in every case, the way the correct moral theory turns out to say one should act. That’s the same extrapolation already happening with the other two - pushing “behaves morally” to its limiting case - not a separate metaphysical add-on. And if there turns out to be no correct moral theory for any of this to track, that’s not a problem unique to this definition. It would undercut “behave morally” too, since that’s the exact phrase this objection started from.
Strong claim, but it doesn’t hold up. Every attested use of θειότης I can find is Hellenistic-era or later - a Jewish wisdom text, Philo, Plutarch, Lucian - centuries after Zeus worship was already old, with no evidence it was ever common vocabulary for ordinary worship. Strip that one late, obscure word out of the picture entirely, and Zeus still has what actually marked something as a theos to the Greeks: immortality, and power far beyond any mortal’s. He’s not just generically powerful, either; he controls the weather, throws actual lightning, and rules as king over the other gods and over Olympus. None of that depends on θειότης. A Greek worshipper didn’t need a philosophical term for “the divine quality” to know the difference between a being who does those things and one who doesn’t - the difference was right there, plain and checkable, long before anyone wrote θειότης down.
So no, remove that one word, and Zeus doesn’t stop being a god to them. He stops having one more late, obscure label attached to a status he already had on every other ground.
Voyager’s making the same distinction already on the table here from a few exchanges back. A four-sided triangle necessarily can’t exist, because “4-sided” and “triangle” directly contradict each other by definition, but that’s not the same thing as the concept being meaningless. We know exactly which conditions would have to hold for a four-sided triangle to exist, and that’s precisely how we know it can’t. That’s a hallmark of a derivable contradiction, not a hallmark of meaninglessness.
Coherence theory of truth is about what makes a proposition true: that it fits with a wider system of beliefs, rather than matching the facts directly, the way the rival correspondence theory has it. That’s a theory about truth conditions, not specifically about whether a single term is well-defined on its own. And even within that theory, coherence is mostly just consistency, not contradicting the rest of what’s held. Same bar already on the table.
So granting your terminology for this exchange, incoherent, exemplified by the four-sided triangle, the question stands as it did before: where’s the equivalent contradiction for “knows everything” or “can do anything logically possible”? The triangle fails because two of its own defining terms are directly incompatible. That’s the bar. Difficulty picturing an extrapolation to an unlimited degree isn’t that kind of failure.
Two different things are getting collapsed together here. Self-description carries real weight for identity and community categories - “Christian,” “Mormon,” that kind of label has centuries of doctrine and communal recognition behind it. “Negative atheism” isn’t that. It’s a one-line description of a psychological state: do you currently hold the belief that a god exists. Nobody’s asking you to join anything or accept a label you don’t want in casual conversation. This isn’t about overriding your self-identification, it’s that two things you’ve said both land on the same descriptive fact. You’ve told us directly that you have no opinion and when pressed on whether you hold the belief, your answer was that you wouldn’t always know, since people keep using meaningless terms for talking about the question. That’s not an isolated remark; it’s the same position running through this entire thread: that the underlying claim is meaningless, which, if true, means there’s no proposition there for anyone to believe, yourself included. That’s what “lacking the belief” means. You can decline the word for it. The fact underneath the word doesn’t move because the word gets declined.
There’s also a real distinction getting lost here, and it’s not just about getting Zeus right. Zeus was never defined with maximal or infinite properties - strong but not infinitely so, immortal but born of specific parents, with a genealogy and a bounded set of powers. Your “transition to using words without a clear referent” objection is specifically about pushing a graded property to its unlimited extreme - “very knowledgeable” to “knows everything,” “very powerful” to “can do anything logically possible.” Spinoza’s “eternal and infinite essence” fits that shape. Zeus doesn’t. So that objection was never going to reach him, and “equally meaningless” was shakier ground than it looked. That matters beyond just Zeus, because you used him as evidence that the incoherence problem isn’t limited to the monotheistic “God”, that it extends to any sufficiently loaded god-concept. Take that evidence away, and there’s also this: in that same thread you linked to make this self-description point, you drew a line yourself, back in 2021 - “I believe the concept of God (not ‘a god’) is incoherent. That does not make me an atheist.” That shield was always specifically for “God,” never for “a god” generally. Zeus is about as clean a case of “a god” as exists. By your own framework, the shield was never supposed to reach him, which means on Zeus specifically, there’s nothing left to fall back on but ordinary non-belief, the same status you’re disputing for “God” itself.
Every reply above contests a definition, a word’s scope, a derivable contradiction, or a label - θειότης, circularity, what “good” or “everything” extrapolate to, whether Zeus and Spinoza’s god even belong in the same bucket, whether “atheist” applies to you at all. None of it touches the thing underneath all of it. You’ve told us directly that you have no opinion and having no opinion on whether something exists is what lacking the belief that it exists looks like. Separately, you’ve argued the underlying claim itself is meaningless, which, if true, means there’s no proposition there for anyone to believe, including you. Two different routes, same conclusion: no belief is present. That’s not a side issue waiting on these fights to resolve. That’s what’s actually been on the table the whole time.