Why an Atheist Thinks the Shroud of Turin is the Real Deal

Negativity

I vaguely remember, from school days long ago, being corrected for the grammatical sin of writing a double negative. I had written  something to the effect of “there was not nothing funny about that.” It meant, of course, that there was nothing funny about whatever it was I was writing about. It was, I was to learn, the same in mathematics, a negative of a negative value is a positive value. And it is true in the mundane logic of computer logic that if something is not not true it is true. It is no different in photography. A negative of a negative is a positive. And that was the way it was with photography from the time it was invented until the invention of digital cameras with only a couple of exceptions: color slide film and Polaroid instant pictures—and even those are not exceptions, but we won’t get into that.

Now this last paragraph may have seemed overly simplistic to some—an insult to your intelligence. However, in giving talks about the shroud, I have encountered blank stares and head scratching when I mentioned that a negative of a negative is a positive. A hand flew up during one of my talks. “What do you mean, I negative of a negative of a negative is a positive?”

I tried to explain. I stopped the PowerPoint presentation running on my laptop computer and switched to a simple little graphics programs that comes with the Windows operating systems. I brought up a picture on the screen. I used the command to invert the picture, which means the same things as making a negative image. Now to change it back, I did the same thing again by making a negative of the negative. Voila, the negative of the negative was a positive. “Do you see?” I asked.

“Yeah, right!” Those two words, together, is the only known example in the English language of a double positive equaling a negative.