On Gematria

 

Philo, the Jewish theologian [1^st-c. CE]  explains that God took six days to create the world because the number three stands for the male and two for the female and that  through the creative act of multiplying them  you get six.

-- Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture (1942)

God indeed made the integers – all the integers:  even 13, and 666.

For:

Pace superstition, 13 is simply prime, albeit rather a pricky prime.  Get to know this genus as a whole, and “13” will recede into the chorus line.

As for “666” – it is only in a purely contingent garment, the doubly-ham-handed accident of base-10 arithmetic, that this appears in such a symmetric form.  In any other base, it is an obvious hodgepodge.  To imagine that such a number possesses the least interest, is mere idolatry.  ‘Tis not the Number of the Beast – ‘tis the Number of the Moron.

[Nevertheless, for a bit of number-fun, consider this:
http://murphybros.blogspot.com/2011/10/8-8-8.html ]

And as for numerology—O ye of frigging little faith!  -- God wanna talk, he talk; no wanna talk, no talk;  but He’s not going to play some puerile hide-the-chestnut parlor-game, where He speaks in riddles, tossing out little number-puzzles  when He might have said, plainly: This;  yea, that. ….

An advantage of the Cantorian comfort with infinities  is that particular integers do not loom so large.

*

An observant Muslim of my acquaintance asked how I’d spent the weekend.  “With mathematics and religion,” I replied.

To my surprise, she brightened, and indicated her interest in numerology.

“But,” I stammered in reply, “surely such things are harâm in Islam?”  -- Not at all, she countered:  The number seven, for instance, is sacred, “because there are seven heavens, and God made the world in seven days.”

It is difficult to argue with that sort of thing.  Impossible, in fact.

She is not alone among Muslims  in indulging in that unfortunate propensity:

http://miraclesofthequran.com/mathematical_index.html

*

Well.  I won’t get into the theology of the thing; but a word on the mathematics.

Only the primes are -- primal, so to speak; whereas the composite numbers are ontologically/taxonomically one rung down, being -- literally -- the product of primes.

In this manner we built up the integers in an entirely different way, from an independent perspective.  (For one thing, here multiplication is basic;  in the successor-function approach, it’s addition.)   The result, considered as an unstructured heap, still has the same roster of individuals, but the construction is different.

Further, once you get past Kroneckerian partial-nominalism (realism about the natural numbers, nominalism about everything else), the role of integers becomes less central.  For instance, they are not at the center of point-set topology.