But I'll provide the same counter-argument to your sim-creator that I provide against theism and see how it stands. If this simulator is able to induce worship by, for example, occasionally creating miracles and inspiring avatars, then why doesn't he do a better job of it? (Maybe this is a who-can-induce-the-most-vehement-worship tournament and the rules are very strict? For example, only 5 interferences in the first 5000 years?) Also, the Jesus avatar was very keen on human fellowship. If the sim-creator was keen on this, why did he instill such antagonistic human behaviors?
The Player plays in mysterious ways.
Interesting points. Hard, though, to have good priors for. My default assumption would be that the game imposes restrictions, such as the laws of physics and of game theory; and the Player tries to create an interesting world within those restrictions. The Player isn't free to say, "Humans will all be nice to each other all the time!" That isn't an evolutionarily stable strategy.
IMHO, given the laws of physics and what we know about game theory and evolutionary theory, it's pretty amazing that we have creatures who care about each other at all, and art, and music. (It doesn't contradict these theories, but it is counter-intuitive.) I would give the Player a pretty high score.
The advantage of the argument in my post is that it tries to make only simple claims about how a God should be expected to behave. "God made the universe for fun" is much simpler, and therefore has a higher prior, than "God should construct the universe to contain super-happy beings", which embeds many assumptions about God's circumstances, morality, energy budget, etc.
There is an apparent 'force for good' in the universe, which people can deify if they want (or externalize for convenience, as I do).
This is a digression, but: Suppose the universe has no force for good, and has an average goodness of zero. Would we not expect that the creatures that thrived best in that universe would perceive the universe as good?
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!".)