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The breadth of scholarship and the light-handedness of the author, Professor David L. Miller, make this book a movable, digestible and an enjoyable feast. The work is “applied science,” game theory to theology. This is something that had to come, luckily through Professor Miller's skill and erudition. And, in contrast to the others who are wise in the games that other people play, he works his own stables, sans hobby-horse. (The introductory chapter is entitled: “The Care and Feeding of Hobby Horses.”)
Quick in finding “the game” in another's discipline, scholars and professional persons generally find their own, serious or sacrosanct. And Professor Miller becomes the authentic descendant of Paul who, after all, offered “folly” as a successor (and antidote) to the “reason” of the Greeks and the “signs” of the Hebrews. The author also is in obvious agreement with Marcuse's elevation of the “polymorphous perverse” and “desublimation” as the true sexuality. “Play,” Professor Miller tells us, “is purposeless.” “Persons who play games in order to win are not playing games; they are working at them.” Again, “All life is for play: foreplay.” Indeed, getting there is all the fun, and that's all there is, there isn't any morel Professor Miller has joined the ranks of the quiet revolutionaries, promoting the heretical concept that people ought to enjoy what they are doing—and having something to do that they can enjoy. In this vein, people might kid around with God just as He mericlessly teases them. And why not? Religion might open the door, as it had closed it, on joy and happiness.
So far so good. Psychiatry is a game, science is the great entertainment, life itself, as Szasz states, a hierarchy of games. Of course, game theory is a way of looking at life. There are