The language of Eden may have been mathematics

In the book of Genesis 1, God “speaks” the universe into existence.

And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.

The Apostle John writes that these words God uses, the word of God, were Jesus Christ:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. ² He was in the beginning with God. ³ All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made.

This divine language, therefore, is seen by Christians as the second person of the divine Trinity.

But what about languages that humans use? People weren’t speaking things into existence like God, nor is there any indication that Adam spoke God’s creation language, but Genesis 2 tells us that Adam named all the animals. While these names do not create them, naming something in this ancient culture is a way of claiming dominion over that thing.

There is some debate as to exactly how Adam named them. Did he give them random names that occurred to him, or did he give them their true names, the names that they deserved? We don’t know for sure, but there is some indication that it was the latter.

The first time a human speaks in Genesis is right after God creates woman (Genesis 2:23 ESV).

This at last is bone of my bones
and flesh of my flesh;
she shall be called Woman,
because she was taken out of Man.

Although Adam names what she is, he does not name her, and therefore claims dominion over her as Eve, till after the Fall. Eve is the only name we know Adam gave other than “woman”. Eve means to give life and is a name appropriate to the ancestor of all women. Hence, it suggests that other names Adam gave to creatures were also appropriate.

I would like to ask, however, an important question here. What language was Adam speaking in the Garden?

People have been asking this question since before the time of Jesus, it turns out. Some Jewish scholars and St. Augustine of Hippo believed it was Hebrew, and, naturally, this is the language that would have been passed down to Abraham. Others said it was Syriac or some other Semitic language. Still more thought it was an unknown, unchangeable, and Eternal language.

In Genesis, humans all speak the same language until the story of the Tower of Babel, or, possibly, a bit before that, depending on how you read Genesis 10:5 and the scattering of the descendants of Noah as each having their own language. The Tower doesn’t happen till Genesis 11, well after Noah and the Flood. Presumably, whatever language this is is the same language Adam speaks in the Garden, or perhaps, fittingly, a corruption of it.

Some Muslim scholars even believed that Adam was not the first human on Earth but rather the first speaking human. His language, his ability to name things, is what distinguished him from prior human-like ancestors. Thus, the ability to name things is what makes Adam uniquely human and uniquely destined to rule and also to fall.

All this speculation about Adam’s language being Hebrew or Syriac or some other Semitic language fails to acknowledge the characteristics that the original language must have, characteristics that may have less to do with the form of the sounds it made and more to do with its internal structure.

In his 1977 work, The Language of Adam, Russell A. Fraser says this about Adam’s language:

In the Garden of Eden, Adam spoke a language in which one word conveyed the root meaning of one thing without the possibility of confusion. His language was semiotic. It ignored or rather penetrated the surfaces of things, because the surface is multiform and therefore confusion. It moved directly, and like an arrow, to inner natures, illuminating them instantly and once and for all… It was everywhere comprehensible…

(Semiotic means signs and symbols, including spoken words.) Thus, let us establish that one of the requirements for the language of Adam, the language that God gave mankind in the beginning, is that it is unambiguous and describes the intrinsic nature of things. It gets at the essence of a thing, not its surface appearance.

The great semiotician and novelist Umberto Eco wrote in his Serendipities: Language and Lunacy, a history of the language of Paradise, as he called it, starting with Genesis, going through Plato and Aristotle, and ending up at the great Italian poet Dante who was deeply interested in this question of what language Adam spoke:

Before the blasphemy of Babel, mankind had known but one language, a perfect language, a language spoken by Adam and his posterity.

Whether you believe the story in Genesis is literally true or figurative, the existence of such a language is entirely plausible. Two questions occur to me: what kind of language was this that was semiotic, penetrated the surface of things, and was perfect? And is it possible to recover this language today?

As a mathematician, I may be biased, but if there is such a language, I believe it must be that of mathematics (or, more properly, mathematics, logic, and science).

By this, I do not mean expressed in esoteric symbols, which is how many people view mathematics today. I mean that it is expressed in clear, logical progression and unambiguous statements. Moreover, it names things based on their essential and invariant properties. It is an Eternal language, not in its form, but in its substance.

How do we know this?

Mathematics is the only language that allows us to predict things that we have never before observed and then, with high probability, observe them. Thus, it is the only language that can reliably predict the future. It does this because it can be conformed so tightly to reality that it mimics it in its internal, semiotic system.

Mathematics is also the only language that has arisen in multiple cultures independently, pointing to its universality. A human culture entirely cut off from all other cultures would naturally, given the right conditions, invent the same mathematics as ours, albeit not the same symbols or syntax. Yet the meaning would be the same.

It is objective. It describes the internal nature of things. For example, we discovered that Hilbert spaces describe quantum systems precisely. This was not something that we invented arbitrarily. It just seems as if those spaces explain the objective nature of quantum particles and fields.

Thus, we can conclude that mathematics represents deep truths about the universe, not merely those we invented.

It would indeed be a miracle if a human invented system somehow corresponded not only to the universe we have observed, but that which we have not observed. After all, the universe need not be intelligible. As Einstein once said, it is a miracle that it is.

Those who read my work regularly might wonder how I can make an argument for mathematical or scientific realism when I have pushed a Wittgensteinian view of mathematics on multiple occasions. But it is possible to promote both points of view.

Wittgenstein suggested that mathematics was no more than a human language game. He objected to philosophical debates going too far, much further than they are able based on logic alone. My contention about realism has never been that Wittgenstein is the final word, but rather that materialist-Atheism falls into the Wittgensteinian trap. It cannot explain why mathematics is anything more than a language game because it rejects the immaterial. You must have a Creator with a Rational Mind to support mathematical realism. Thus, mathematical realism implies Theism.

The language God invented for us is what we call mathematics. While language games are arbitrary, mathematics has a non-arbitrary structure that mysteriously matches observations of the universe. If this were an illusion, we would notice the same properties in other languages, but we do not.

How did Adam speak mathematics?

Mathematics is more than just numbers. Fundamentally, mathematics is the clear expression of logical deductions from precise definitions. The currency of math is often numbers, but it can be any concept. When it deals with things like morality, we call it Ethics; when it deals with the nature of reality, it is Metaphysics, but it is still a kind of mathematics when expressed with precision.

This may be why philosophers have increasingly chosen to use symbols to express logical statements rather than human languages. This helps not only with precision but universality.

Mathematics deals with precise definitions that get at the intrinsic essence of a thing.

Consider the following definition:

An irrational number is a number that cannot be expressed as the ratio of two whole numbers.

This definition gets at the essence of the irrational number in such a way that there is no ambiguity, no exceptions, and no alternatives.

Thus, if I were Adam, mathematically naming animals, my names would not be arbitrary sounds but names that correspond to the essential nature of those creatures. They would be names that are “right” for them in the sense of being precise definitions (or shorthand for such definitions) as later taxonomists would discover.

Consider that in the Old Testament, God gives his name as “I am that I am” (Exodus 3:14). This is God’s essential nature because he is a necessary being, one whose essence is existence.

Why then is human language no longer like this?

Partly it is because humans have found ways to lie with their language. We can hide the fact that we are lying by using ambiguity and euphemism. Partly it is because language evolves and changes based on how people want to use it. Thus, these language games, far from determining all language, including mathematics, compete with the essential language, removing its precision and penetrating nature to change definitions to conform to human preferences rather than objective reality.

The Tower of Babel reflects this tendency of human language to increase confusion as the designs of human beings stray further and further away from truth and reality. We see this now in many post-modernist pushes to make language less meaningful and more ambiguous so people can claim to be something they are not.

I imagine that the language of Adam runs much deeper than numbers and animals to people as well. Imagine a language that describes someone based not on surface qualities such as pretty, rich, and powerful, but their inner nature, such as kind, faithful, and wise. Such a language not only describes a person this way but names them based on who they are at heart.