In her 2024 book Playing with Reality: How Games Shape Our World, neuroscientist and physicist Kelly Clancy examines the profound role that games have played in human history. She demonstrates how war games influenced the outcomes of actual wars in the 19th and 20th centuries, and how game theory has shaped our understanding of human behaviour.

Among other topics, she explores the connection between gambling with dices, religion—and Albert Einstein:

The Bible prohibited regular people from using lots to make decisions, though representatives of God could. Perhaps chief among the decisions made in this way was the apportionment of land by lottery—for example, dividing estates fairly among heirs. It was so fundamental to the priestly profession that the Greek word kleros, meaning “lot, chance,” gave rise to the word clergy. God may not play dice, as Albert Einstein famously asserted, but sometimes dice play God.

Clancy, K. (2024). Playing with reality: How games shape our world. Riverhead Books, p. 44.