Quora answer: How does an atheist reconcile with the same logic used for “God does not exist” and “God does not not exist”? Are they the same logically?

It was the when English was given its grammar based on Latin precedents that the idea that two negatives makes a positive was applied. In English multiple negatives always meant something different in each case as in the first sentence in Chaucer’s Tales, and thus rather than negatives cancelling in English it takes us up into meta-levels which is the dual of the Meta-levels of Being. Only Indo-European languages have Being so since Existence is not striated, the only way to get something like the meta-levels of Being is to look at the meta-levels of Non-Existence.

God is considered the Supreme Being. Onto-Theological Metaphysics according to Heidegger is bound up in asserting the Being of God as both Good only and Absolute which is a contradiction in itself. What is absolute should be beyond all differentiating criteria. The best image of the Absolute is the one in the Hindu tradition which is the Nirguna Brahman. This is the idea of the Godhead that appears in Meister Eckhart as well. But of course he was being tracked down by the thought police of his era for thinking so. The Absolute in fact negates the Supreme Being producing an infinite characterless desert that is empty. Meister Eckhart says it boils within itself to give rise to the incarnation, i.e. the avatars of God (krisna, christ, etc). This boiling is not unlike what Sartre talks about when he reverses Heidegger to come up with Nothingness rather than Process Being (Becoming) as the basis of human consciousness. So nothingness, or the boiling of the Godhead, is like the negation of the absolute which results in something positive, i.e. an incarnation. This logic of two wrongs make a right runs pretty deep.  We see it play out in the Mahabharata with Krisna suggesting that each of the Pandavas violate the Dharma,for which they end up in Hell, while their evil enemies end up in Heaven, before they realize that heaven and hell is an illusion. The Pandavas must violate the Dharma which they uphold as the sacred law in order to win over their evil opponents the Karavas in this war of attrition between two branches of the same family. Evils on both sides cancel each other out, but also cancel out the family because their the children are killed in a night raid. Krisna tells Arjuna to fight because that is the dharma of the Warrior class, even against ones family. Upholding the Dharma of ones caste is above all other duties, even the duty to ones family. But in battle it is impossible to ultimately hold to the dharma, and so in the end those who are best because of their upholding the dharma become the worst because of their breaking with the dharma in the heat of battle when means overcomes the rules that control ends.

This same message of the cancellation of negations in Western Logic as seen in the Logic of Hegel in its most embellished form, prevents the arising of the meta-system which is ultimately polytheistic. It is what preserves the system like the trinity (Hades, Poseidon, Zeus, or what ever trinity one can imagine. Notice Robust Theories in the meaning of S. Wallis are always triangular  like Newton’s law, or Ohm’s law. The triangle is the least stable configuration, i.e. the minimal figure in two dimensional space. There are minimal solids in each dimension, like the tetrahedron in the fourth dimension, etc. These are the minimal stable thought forms. If the triangle is the minimal form and the tetrahedron the minimal system, as B. Fuller says, then the way to preserve them and not have them tip over into the meta-system is to enforce the cancellation of double negatives in logic. If each negative as a different meaning as in Old English, and even Middle English then that opens up a more and more subtle realm which is hard to think about and understand which makes it easy to slip into incomensurabilities, and non-representational ethereal realms which are hard to understand.

Atheism is the negation of Theism, and so if we negate that then we do not necessarily come back to Theism. This is the dictum of Deleuze that Repetition is that which does not Repeat. An excellent example of that is sacrifice which destroys whole animals in order to get back to some primordial wholeness which is unachievable. We keep repeating the initial destruction of primordial wholeness thinking we can by that return to that wholeness but it does not work. Similarly the denial of God over and over again does not expunge it from human nature that sees gods everywhere, or under monotheism sees God everywhere. In the Metaphysical era we were immersed in a world filled with meaning and with gods. In the Meta-physical era according to Heidegger we are living in the age of the vanishing and passing of the Gods and our response is nostalgia for the Mythopoietic, and the loss of meaning as Anomie and Alienation that comes with modernism.

What we are saying here is that the assumption that two negatives make a positive as in Arithmetic may not apply to to experience and there is reason to believe that this was imposed on English when its grammar was created to conform to Latin, and thus perhaps this is a false choice. Rather than Atheism being negated to produce Theism again, perhaps it just produces an open series of realms of higher and higher negation that is the dual of the meta-levels of Being, like Pure, Process, Hyper, Wild and Ultra being which takes us into the core of Being where we find Existence. Similarly if we think of God as the Supreme Being encompassing all the meta-levels of Being and Non-Being, and Appearance then we get something similar to the ideas of the Hindus about Brahma (Apollo), Shiva (Dionysus), and Vishnu which takes us into the realm of polytheisms where the various gods are the expression of the Godhead, as in Egypt by the way. This is a Nietzschian view of the striation of the Will To Power caught up in Eternal Return. Somewhere very far from the impoverishment of thought produced by Modernity, and more in line with the Romanticism that is symbolized by Goya’s Dreams of Reason.