THE GOD GAME Andrew M. Greeley, TOR Books, New York: 1987 Reviewed by D. B. Timmins Some years ago when I was on the threshold of the Senior Foreign Service, I was sent with about twenty other mid-career U.S. diplomats and other promising government officials to a two week course in negotiation at Harper's Ferry. Toward the end of the seminar, when we'd learned about all we were going to learn from an impressive assembly of guest lecturers and top State Department officials, our course Chairman challenged us to a special negotiation on disarmament (this may be particularly instructive when the U.S. and Soviet Union are for the first time in history seriously discussing the possibility of a reduction in armaments). The Chairman told us that if we could successfully negotiate the elimination of nuclear arms between our two teams, he would take the entire seminar class to dinner. If we failed, we would pay for his dinner. The set up was that each of two teams of ten would nominate two principal negotiators to represent its side (four in all), work out instructions in caucus for our negotiators, and hold not more than ten negotiating sessions. After three rounds of rather fruitless talks, I, being the only professional economist present, finally got my side to undertake a benefit/cost analysis of the world economic situation which we could present to the other side as a basis for serious discussion. It was clear from the shirt cuff figures we worked out that if in our imaginary world we could negotiate a treaty, we could afford to buy everyone on both sides a new house, a new car, provide medical insurance for everyone, and offer full college scholarships for all qualified young people in both nations. In the real world of Harper's Ferry, we could win a free mean just by agreeing among ourselves -- twenty senior government officials of the same general social background, educational level, and interests, and take our instructor for a ride to boot -- simply by coming to agreement in the unreal world of make believe negotiations. Talk became serious and we were making real progress. Just before the end of the next to last scheduled talk, one round to go, during which our side fully expected a treaty to be signed, they "zapped" us. After the game was over we asked, "Why with a free dinner at hand, did you do such a dumb thing to us?" Answer: "'Cause we thought you were leading us down the garden path and were going to 'zap' us when we showed up for the signing ceremony." There is a lot of distrust in the world, and the survival of the species when so many other life forms have disappeared, suggests that it may be an indispensable survival mechanism. I decided after our disarmament game that maybe rational thinkers (as I prided myself on being) are not always best equipped to lead nations. And I've since marveled at the miracle of physical and emotional openness we are capable of achieving at the personal and family level -- and which is essential to the survival of the species. This event and these thoughts were brought to mind when I began to read Andrew Greeley's God Game . The book is about the apparent impossibility of bringing human Agency into accord with either God's will or God's teaching in the circumstances of this world. An incredibly advanced computer game is developed by a young genius and brought to his friend for trial. The software is programmed with a virtually infinite variety of characters and actions, the player simply being required to choose an opening gambit and a desired outcome, then intervene at strategic moments to guide the characters towards the outcome. As play proceeds, the protagonist discovers that the "free will' (i.e. uncertainty) programmed into the characters' responses, is such that he is repeatedly frustrated as he tries to guide action towards a conclusion. At last it dawns on him that he is, in fact, God to the people of the computer world, and that like the God of the human world it is difficult reliably to guide actors to whom Free Agency has been accorded -- especially when God has chosen to absent Himself from direct intervention except at certain crucial junctures of history. One in brought in mind of the parable of the wheat and the tares in which the Lord of the Vineyard announces his intention to let the good and the bad grow together for his own purposes. One begins to understand why Obedience is the first law of the Gospel. Lucifer, at an early state, and despite his brilliance, could not subject his will to Another. Clearly some moral imperatives are based on the wisdom of the ages, such as not killing wantonly, not stealing, not coveting, observing sexual exclusivity in the interest of the care and education of children and the avoidance of sexually transmitted diseases. Other rules of morality may prove to be no more than arbitrary choices intended to avoid collision of conflicting wills, e.g. driving on the right (or left) side of the road. Be this as it may, LDS theology teaches that one of the purposes of this life is to inculcate the principle of obedience, permitting the self-selection of those able to subject their preferences to that of righteous leadership in the interest of social harmony. To the thinking Latter-day Saint, the felicity of the Celestial Kingdom depends on this auto-selection of those who can live by the rules. Other Kingdoms of Glory depend on strict supervision (and as necessary firm persuasion?) by Administering Angels who are themselves partakers of this "inner-directed" goodness. The Kingdom "of no glory" -- although here we must speculate -- is presumably where those who will not or cannot follow rules, will live in eternal conflict -- not having been able to learn, as have the more enlightened, that rules are in the last analysis essential to freedom -- even if some of them may be no more than arbitrary choices of convenience. Greeley concedes that his understanding of Free Will is not the only (or even the only Christian) interpretation, citing the debate between Molinists and Suarezians and the different views of Whitehead and William James. But the Greeley view seems closer to the accepted LDS view than most theologians or philosophers familiar to this reader. In my own view, I have come to describe this view as deistic existentialism . Existential because the reality of the human condition is that the rules are part of the nature of the universe and must be accepted without appeal to a deus ex machina -- an external actor. Deistic because supremely intelligent beings do exist within the universe who can catalyze , i.e . enormously speed up the evolutionary process through their experience and wisdom through episodic intervention in human affairs at critical moments in history. (See author's Chaos Theory paper in this same volume). But otherwise, in the interest of allowing human beings to auto- select themselves for future high callings according to their ability to obey the rules of the road, so manifesting their inner-directed propensity for social harmony, the LDS God (and the Greeley "God") stays out of the picture. This is very difficult to understand or accept for most folk who constantly complain that God is either asleep , doesn't care, or doesn't exist because he doesn't intervene at every turn to prevent war, plague, infant deaths, or accidents to good people. Such folk simply have no profound understanding of the nature of God or Man or the role of Free Agency in human evolution and the structure of the universe. Which brings us to Greeley's main thesis: the possibility of man participating in the "god nature". To Greeley, as Catholic priest and free-wheeling ultra-Catholic theologian/writer of popular fiction, this idea is more than a little daring (and it is clear he is using his cover as novelist to protect his reputation for doctrinal soundness as priest). For a Latter-day Saint, much of what he has to say is old hat. Indeed, the concept of man into god is the principle Mormon contribution to contemporary theological thought -- and a major heresy arousing the repudiation of the LDS Church as an acceptable variety of Christianity by many Main Line ministers (but see author's paper on Orthodox theology in this same volume).. Greeley's next insight, that of parallel cosmoi arising from the nature of the universe and which may operate on different sets of elemental forces subtly penetrable by human mind and spirit, is remarkably close to the teaching of Joseph Smith that the Spirit World is not in the sky or on an alien planet, but of this world, and in fact, all around us in another dimension of being. Moreover, Greeley's notion of multiple inhabited cosmoi is closer to the LDS teaching regarding the Three Degrees of Glory and the "Worlds without number have I created" than any other Christian teaching I'm familiar with. And, darned if he doesn't speculate that the rare crosser of the cosmotic barriers are the sources of life in new worlds -- shades of Adam in the temple ceremony! The God Game is not only a fun book to read for SciFi and Gothic fiction buffs, it virtually demands attentive reading by Latter-day Saints interested in how a well-educated, theologically sophisticated Catholic deals with concepts new to him, but a century and a half old to us. Greeley's thinking holds hope that someday LDS theology might be studied, understood, and accepted by thinkers on the cutting edge of science, philosophy, and even theology. Mormon Apostle Orson Pratt once gave a marvelous discourse in which he reconciled the LDS concept of a Deity of physical tabernacle with the prevailing Christian belief in God as all-pervasive spirit, immanent throughout the breadth of the universe. A non-LDS author has now written a book, albeit fiction, which has achieved a convergence of Catholic theological speculation with many standard LDS doctrines.