The God Game

Yes, yes, it's been a while. Travel got in the way.

I had a conversation on a discussion board I frequent about the nature of God. What does God want? How do your reconcile free will? All that jazz.

I then had a thought that since we were discussing possible motivations and actions of God, some Game Theory might be in order. So if one is willing to look beyond the fallacy of applying human definitions to a deity, here is some analysis to help explain why God does or does not do something.

There are three basic assumptions about any given Game Theoretic player:
1. They know the rules of the game. While this is a problematic assumption for real world experiments, I think it's pretty safe for God.
2. They are self interested. That is, they are most interested in improving their personal utility. This is tricky and we will get to it later.
3. They are rational. They can compute and compare the different options available to them. Depending how much potency you ascribe to God or Gods, this can be a pretty safe assumption.

But because God is not mortal, one must discuss what other assumption we can ascribe to God.
Omniscience is common. In this context, it would mean supreme rationality. God has no need to compute and compare options in order to find the optimal solution, God just knows. Thus, God knows what the optimal solution is in each possible situation and has no reason to not do it.
Omnipotence is also common. But what would this mean as far as Game Theory is concerned? Basically, it means God can cheat. God can change the number, nature, value, etc of the players, the options, etc to whatever. If this is so, why would God not do this?

But we must come back to the issue of self-interest. What is God interested in? Often people will ascribe human emotions and motivations to the Gods of their mythos(Greek and Norse Gods are great examples) and as a result, their goals are not unlike human goals on a grander scale. Thus there is not much surprise that Gods like that are often jerks. Greek Gods in particular were notoriously spiteful.

But what really is the goal of God?

Since God is often portrayed as a creator, it would also make sense to think of God in a Mechanism Design situation, as a central authority manipulating a game so that the players act in a specific way. This is actually a very apt position for God.

Omniscience and Omnipotence still beg the age-old questions, though. Why not interfere? Why such poor design? What is the goal? And thus the question of motivation comes back.

While we can't necessarily assume what God's interest is, we can be sure that God is doing it optimally.