Imagine that someone tells you about god G, and that G wants you to do action A and avoid doing B, and will reward you massively for doing its will, and punish you massively for defying it. Pascal's wager says that even if G seems highly unlikely to you, the rewards and punishments are sufficiently big that you are better off doing A and avoiding B anyway.
But for any G, you can also imagine Ḡ, a god of equal power who wants you to do action B and avoid doing A — exactly the opposite of what G wants. G wants you to go to temple and be vegetarian; Ḡ wants you to sleep in and eat hot dogs.
You can also imagine any number of G₁...Gₙ who want incompatible things, like going to their temple instead.
And Pascal's wager by itself cannot discriminate among them. All the different offers and threats of massive rewards and punishments cancel out. Without something to break the symmetry — some reason to believe that G₁₂₃ is more probable than G₆₉ — Pascal's wager can't tell us which temple to attend!
Fair enough, it would be impossible to know for certain that the angelic cohort and white clad man really were from heaven. I suppose they could simply show everyone what heaven and hell were like?
But then how would you know that footage was real?
"What if some major human religion with an anthropomorphic God turns out to be literally correct" is not very interesting to think about; though perhaps in the hands of a good author, it could lead to intense fiction, as one explores the consequences of living in a world where e.g. Heaven or Hell exists.
However, if the topic is "how much of your values or even your humanity would you abandon, in order to survive in a transformed world", that's much more relevant...
Then there's a HUGE hole in the scenario right where all the load-bearing assumptions are.
What sort of evidence convinced the person in the scenario that Christianity is actually with probability greater than 0.99 correct, and definitely less than 1% chance of every other scenario combined? How do you distinguish this from the whims of a powerful being who can read minds and do lots of other stuff, forcing people to accept that it is correct on pain of eternal death or torture? The only difference here from literal Christianity seems to be the idea that the powerful being is good and just in doing that, so what evidence made the person accept that?
I'm assuming that the powerful being can't (or won't) write minds as well, since being mind-probed into belief is not really that interesting.
This is an interesting piece, thought provoking, but the core premise is unconvincing. As you've presented things, maybe in this case, I have to accept that there is some super-powerful being that will do really bad things to me if I don't kowtow, or do really good stuff for me if I do, but that's not the same as truly accepting that this being is the fundamental reference for right and wrong, and that aligning with what this being says is ultimately good, and not aligning with it is evil. There's a fundamental difference between believing, "According to God, [religiously proscribed thing] is wrong", and, "[religiously proscribed thing] is wrong". In your scenario, maybe I become convinced of the former, and either rebel, or avoid [religiously proscribed thing], or try find some way to appease God, while in the second case, I'll either be genuinely trying to change, or at least feeling really guilty about being such a bad person.
There's a big difference between being an Atheist in a quandary, versus being truly converted.
The scenario you've presented starts with the discovery that the universe is different than previously believed, but glosses over the steps for me to become convinced "with p(99%), that Christianity is and always has been true". Maybe for someone at 4 or 5 on the Dawkins scale, just seeing some strong evidence supporting the existence of God nudges them to 1 or 2. But, for me (6), Atheism is not just a matter of lack of evidence, but the cumulative effect of experience and logic. There are versions of God that I could accept, but an arbitrary, anthropomorphized God is a much bigger leap. To get from A to B would involve such a fundamental rewiring of my thought processes, that I'm no longer really the same person I am now. If I got there somehow, I would not be rebelling.
By and large, I expect that we as a community are somewhere south of a 3 on the Dawkins scale.
So considering that from our point of view, we inhabit a godless universe, It's very hard for us to see things the same way as an Evangelical Christian ( If any Evangelical Christians are reading this, no hate to you). Consider how the world would look like for you if you believed that:
He will grant eternal life to you should you obey him. If you do not obey him, he will either: (a) Punish you forever, (b) Simply let your consciousness cease to be once you die.
I think that for all intents and purposes, the answer to the question in the title changes dramatically depending on whether we live in world (a) or (b). Let's imagine the following scenario:
One day, you sit at home idly scrolling through Lesswrong ( or Reddit ) and you hear the most beautiful choir ever. After ensuring that you weren't hallucinating you head outside and see a cohort of beings that could only be described as angels descending from the sky. The cohort is headed by a swarthy bearded man with long hair clad in a white robe and a crown of thorns. He speaks for days on end, his inital words are lost to time but soon the news vans roll in and he's recorded as the world watches with bated breath... no one understands him, because very few people actually understand Aramaic. But the experts are summoned and the experts convene and the experts agree that the Evangelical Christians were right. Unprecedented levels of debate, both academic and popular follow. You and hordes of people from around the world watch close and listen intently. You hear every argument and counter argument until you've decided with p(99%), that Christianity is and always has been true. It is now as clear to you as the fact that 2+2=4. It's not just you either, the fact that Christianity is the most accurate way to explain reality becomes apparent to everyone else as well.
Of course, you know that you could be persuaded otherwise (that perhaps the creatures you saw were aliens or constructs created by a superintelligent time travelling AI), though for now at least, it seems reasonable to suppose with a high probability that the Evangelical Christians were right. Now what?
Let us consider that there will be no sinner-filled lake of fire awaiting you once you die. Your death will simply be the cessation of your conscious experience. If you were an atheist before the second coming, then your beliefs in this area have not really shifted much. This life will still be the only one you experience. Yet, what if there was a way you could truly attain immortality? And not through cryonics or gene therapy or by losing your mouth and gaining a deep desire to scream but merely by accepting that the swarthy man in white from earlier allowed himself to be tortured and killed to pay the price for your sins which his father ( who is also him) could have simply chosen to forgive. Sounds simple doesn't it?
Not so. For you see, he may disagree with you on what should be considered a sin. You may agree with him that it is deeply wrong to kill people or unjustly deceive others but you may not agree that fornication with a consenting partner is a sin. Or that being gay or trans is an affront to god. If you're gay and/or enjoy fornication, you must renounce these desires to be eligible for eternal life. If you're a fulfilled trans woman you must accept that you have been on a doomed path this whole time if you wish to outlive the earth.
But would atheists despair at this knowledge... or rejoice? During their transitional period into atheism (assuming they previously believed in an afterlife), many people begin to lament the loss of an afterlife, or rather their belief in one. I myself began to wish that I'd either never been born or been born into an atheist household where I'd have grown up not believing in an afterlife. I'd compare this to being born into an old money family, expecting to inherit incalculable wealth and-oh no, 2nd cousin Wilhemina just squandered the family fortune. Now you're in the poor-house. Contrast this to having been born in the poor house, knowing damn well that you will have to swim upstream, dodging bears of debt.
So, if you were told that while you would miss out on a reward, you wouldn't be slapped with any additional penalty... how would you feel? Would you go happily to your end, now knowing that the only consequences for imbibing in copious amounts of worldly pleasures are worldly? Or will this knowledge be bittersweet, for you will doubtlessly see friends giving everything that made them themselves up just because they don't want their worlds to end? Will you be among them? Would you do such things?
Would you sell your soul to save it?
And what if we consider that there will be a great penalty imposed upon you when you die? That you will burn forever in a great pit of fire that even Dante was far too charitable in his depictions of? That you will rub shoulders with both Hitler and the scores of children who did not believe in the divinity of the white-clad man. Let us assume this was made apparent when the angelic choir descended, and you believe with p(>80%) that eternal torture will await you should you die unrepentant. What would happen to the world? will we see mass conversion camps and endless cults? What would you do? Would you live harder? knowing that your rebellion will end in failure? Or would you give up everything you are to survive? Will you willingly live an eternity in denial simply because you (understandbly) do not wish to live in fire?
Would you sell your soul to save it?