Gary Drescher once reminded me that von Neumann may have already suffered neurological damage from metastatic cancer at that point, so this lower bound may not be as high as you think (unless that's what you were alluding to by "true reasons").

To expand on that, the difference between the let humans live pascal's wager, and the ordinary pascal's wager, is that letting humans live is the status quo.

Consider the 'don't eat me, my daddy is a cop' argument. It is hardly a pascal's wager. It is a rational thing to consider, especially when there's no shortage of food. It is more plausible that the status quo is product of actions of ultra powerful being, than 'you must give all money you got to me or the god will be pissed off' .

I just learned that von Neumann got... um, "wagered". Considering von Neumann was clearly a transhuman this establishes a lower bound on how smart you can be and still accept Pascal's wager.

It is quite fascinating how the belief in God does oscillate between intelligence (rationality?) levels. Chimpanzees are naturally atheistic. Average humans are religious. Above average humans are usually atheistic. High IQ individuals like Eliezer Yudkowsky tend to be agnostic, in the sense that they assign a nonzero probability to the existence of God and believe in the existence of natural or artificial Gods. And people on the verge of posthumanism like John von Neumann, of whom was said that "only he was fully awake", are again leaning towards theism. I wonder if a truly posthuman AI would oscillate back to atheism while conjecturing that Omega is probably a theist.