We notice there are no obviously immortal world leaders on Earth (but see vi21maobk9vp's comment below). If we therefore limit the possible avatars that our simulator God is using on Earth to the major monotheistic religions of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, and consider them all equiprobable; plus a 25% chance that this God is jumping from one avatar to another, or chose to reveal Himself via Jesus but then Paul screwed everything up, or some other minority position; then p(chr0|ego, ent, sim, Earth) = .25.
I find it hard to believe you mean all this remotely seriously. For starters, you used the current game market in order to calculate the percentage of p(ego|ent, sim) -- and yet you didn't bother using the same tactic to estimate p(chr0|ego, ent, sim, Earth) ?
How many games put you in the position of a military conqueror versus the number of games that put you in a position of a religious leader? How many games put you in the position of even a normal detective or a normal crook versus the ones that put you in the position of a religious leader?
By your own argument, people like Alexander the Great, or Napoleon, or Genghis Khan, or even Hitler are much more likely to have been simulator-avatars than people like Jesus. (Mohammed might work as being both a religious and a military leader) Then mythological (not religious) heroes. After them, would come people like Al Kapone or Billy the Kid. Then, given first-person shooters, would come ordinary soldiers. Religious leaders, by your own argument, would be way down the list for a likely simulator-avatar. Especially mostly pacifist religious leaders, like Jesus or Buddha. (Mohammed or Krishna would be more interesting cases)
So I'd say p(chr0|ego, ent, sim, Earth) = 0.001 -- one in a thousandth chance, even given the assumption of an ego-driven entertainment simulation being what we're in.
By your own argument, people like Alexander the Great, or Napoleon, or Genghis Khan, or even Hitler are much more likely to have been simulator-avatars than people like Jesus.
This is a good counter-argument. I expect from my experience observing humans that players are more likely to play war leaders. However, we don't see immortal war-leaders. So, if our God wants a persistent identity throughout the game, we're limited in what that identity could be. This observation is stronger than our priors about what roles God would want to play.
Let P(chr) = the probability that the statements attributed to Jesus of Nazareth and Paul of Tarsus regarding salvation and the afterlife are factually mostly correct; and let U(C) be the utility of action C, where C is in {Christianity, Islam, Judaism, atheism}.
Two of the key criticisms of Pascal's wager are that
If, however, P(chr) is not infinitessimal, and U(Christianity) is merely very large, these counter-arguments fail.
Many poor arguments have been made that P(chr) > .1. But as far as I know, no one has ever made the best argument in favor of Christianity:
If you accept the simulation argument, then P(sim) > .99.
If you look at the fraction of computing power used for entertainment, I don't know what it is, but the top 100 supercomputer list for June 2011 lists a total of 4,531,940 cores in the top 100 supercomputers in the world; versus (rough guess) a billion personal computers and video game consoles, and a similar number of ordinary computers used at work. It would be reasonable to set p(ent|sim) = .5.
If you set P(ego|ent, sim) according to the fraction of entertainment simulations in which the person playing the game has an avatar in the game, then P(ego|ent, sim) is large. I originally set this at p > .99, but am now setting it to p = .5 in response to Jack's comment below.
We notice there are no obviously immortal world leaders on Earth (but see vi21maobk9vp's comment below). If we therefore limit the possible avatars that our simulator God is using on Earth to the major monotheistic religions of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, and consider them all equiprobable; plus a 25% chance that this God is jumping from one avatar to another, or chose to reveal Himself via Jesus but then Paul screwed everything up, or some other minority position; then p(chr0|ego, ent, sim, Earth) = .25.
P(follow-thru) is difficult to estimate; I will set it somewhat arbitrarily as .1. Given our observations of game-players here on Earth, it is not independent of p(ego), as players of self-glorifying games are likely to be young adolescent males, and so are people who enjoy burning insects with magnifying glasses.
We now have p(chr) > .99 x .5 x .5 x .25 x .1 = .0061875. As stipulated, your afterlife accounts for at least 99% of your utility if follow-thru (and hence chr) is true. If we suppose that the length of time for which God rewards us in Heaven or torments us in Hell has an exponential distribution, and we are considering only the part of that distribution where >= 99% of your utility is in the afterlife, then almost certainly p(chr) * U(Christianity | chr) > (1-p(chr)) * U(atheism | not(chr)). It now appears we should accept Pascal's wager.
(The expected utilities for Christianity and Islam are similar, and this argument gives no reason for favoring one over the other. That is of only minor interest to me unless I accept the wager. The important point is that they both will have expected utilities similar to, and possibly exceeding, that of atheism.)
You can argue with any of the individual numbers above. But you would have to make pretty big changes to make p(chr)(U(Christianity|chr)) negligible in your utility calculation.
(IMHO, voting this article up should indicate it passed the threshold, "That's an interesting observation that contributes to the discussion", not, "Omigod you're right, I am going out to get baptized RIGHT NOW!".)