But if the person you are addressing is an outright extremist who denies both the Names and the Attributes and says, “I will not say that He is existent, living, knowing, or powerful; these names pertain only to His creatures, or they are mere figures of speech, for to affirm them would be to liken Him to something that is existent, living, knowing, and powerful,”

he is told: By the same token, when you declare that He is not existent, not living, not knowing, and not powerful, you are likening Him to what does not exist—and that is far worse than likening Him to things that do exist.

Should he protest, “I deny both affirmation and negation,”

the reply is: You are then forced to liken Him to what combines two mutually exclusive opposites—an impossibility. For it is impossible for anything to be both existent and nonexistent, or to be neither existent nor nonexistent. It is likewise impossible to describe anything as simultaneously possessing existence and non-existence, life and death, knowledge and ignorance, or to portray it by denying both existence and non-existence, life and death, and knowledge and ignorance.