Qiaochu_Yuan has it right - the vast majority of Christians do not constitute additional evidence. Moreover, the Bible (Jewish, Catholic, or Protestant) describes God as an abusive jerk. Everything we know about abusive jerks says you should get as far away from him as possible. Remember that 'something like the God of the Bible exists' is a simpler hypothesis than Pascal's Christianity, and in fact is true in most multiverse theories. (I hate that name, by the way. Can't we replace it with 'macrocosm'?) More generally, if for some odd reason you find yourself entertaining the idea of miraculous powers, you need to compare at least two hypotheses: *Reality allows these powers to exist, AND they already exist, AND your actions can affect whether these powers send you to Heaven or Hell (where "Heaven" is definitely better and not at all like spending eternity with a human-like sadist capable of creating Hell), AND faith in a God such as humans have imagined will send you to Heaven, AND lack of this already-pretty-specific faith will send you to Hell. *Reality allows these powers to exist, AND humans can affect them somehow, AND religion would interfere with exploiting them effectively.

I have found this argument compelling, especially the portion about assigning a probability to the truth of Christian belief. Even if we have arguments that seem to demonstrate why it is that radically smart people believe a religion without recourse to there being good arguments for the religion, we haven't explained why these people instead think there are good arguments. Sure, you don't think they're good arguments, but they do, and they're rational agents as well. You could say, "well they're not rational agents, that was the criticism in the first place," but we have the same problem that they do think they themselves are rational agents. What level do we have to approach that allows you to make a claim about how your methods for constructing probabilities trump theirs? The highest level is just, "you're both human," which makes valid the point that to some extent you should listen to the opinions of others. The next level "you're both intelligent humans aimed at the production of true beliefs" is far stronger, and true in this case. Where the Wager breaks down for me is that much more is required to demonstrate that if Christianity is true, God sends those who fail to produce Christian belief to Hell. Of course, this could be subject to the argument that many smart people also believe this corollary, but it remains true that it is an additional jump, and that many fewer Christians take it than who are simply Christians. What takes the cake for me is asking what a good God would value. It's a coy response for the atheist to say that a good God would understand the reasons one has for being an atheist, and that it's his fault that the evidence doesn't get there. The form of this argument works for me, with a nuance: Nobody is honest, and nobody deserves, as far as I can tell, any more or less pain in eternity for something so complex as forming the right belief about something so complicated. God must be able to uncrack the free will enigma and decide what's