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Pascal's wager is nearly the earliest example of decision theory, and it hardly makes sense to say that the many religions concern simply breaks decision theory. One can do a variety of things to analyze the probability space as well as the payoff space. For an example simplification, suppose there are two possible mutually exclusive levers you could pull, each with some chance of giving you massively large/infinite utility, and P(A pays out)=0.999 while P(B pays out)=0.001. (This is obviously an extreme case, but that's just to build intuition.) Alternatively, one can adjust probabilities such that maybe there's a third mutually exclusive lever that you can pull which has a guaranteed payoff of 1 or whatever. One can make further refinements.
The issue with mutually exclusive religions is that if you pull P(A) and it doesn't pay out, actually it was another faith all along, then you face infinite suffering for being an infidel who foolishly worshipped Jesus as God. You are incentivized to believe in whatever religion has the greatest punishment for nonbelievers to minimize your downside. But then that incentivizes others to make up religions with increasingly worse punishments in the afterlife in order to force you to adhere to the demands of their faith.
It is just not sustainable as there is no way to distinguish between a religion that is made up by humans and one that is actually correct. Playing that game is hopeless from the start.
Interestingly, the base Pascal wager makes sense without any infinite suffering at all. Regardless, there are a variety of ways of handling it, especially if your concern is that Roko (a person) is just making up a basilisk.
This seems to be your real objection, not the multiple religion concern. You think it's just impossible to actually assess anything involved, including probabilities. Presumably, that means it's also impossible for you to assess the probability that atheism is true.
Well yes. But we can prove that many things are true which fly in the face of established religions. For example evolution goes against the Christian creation myth. The sun doesn't actually go to the underworld every night like the ancient Egyptians thought, the earth simply rotates away from it. As far as I can tell, you can repeat this for most religions.
So while I can't prove that atheism is true, I can find arguments that make established religions less likely to be true. If your religion makes claims that turn out to be demonstrably false, then that is fairly solid evidence against it. Even if that was not the case, Pascal's wager still doesn't work. It is not safer for me to subscribe to a religion than it is to be a nonbeliever, as not only are many religions mutually exclusive, several are much harsher to those religions they are directly opposed to than they are to people who simply don't believe.
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My understanding is that Islam does not guarantee salvation, even to Muslims, and that similarly non-Muslims do not necessarily go to eternal torment – which makes the game theory slightly more complex than this. I'd need to do more research into Islam to say this for sure, though, so take that with a grain of salt.
From what I understand most religions say that even people who do not believe in them will be treated differently in the afterlife based on whether or not they are virtuous, and most religions have a fairly similar idea of virtuous behavior. Based on that, I think the game theory suggests that living virtuously as a hedge is a good idea, but I am not sure I've ever seen anyone go down this rabbit hole (either in their personal life or from an abstract game theory perspective).
Surely it's actually fairly easy to determine that some religions are made up by humans...
I would agree with respect to the current dominant religions. A peaceful Buddhist and a peaceful Christian seem very similar. Even the ancient Greek and roman stoics seemed to preach a way of life that is mostly congruent with modern ideals. But Christianity has many extreme denominations, and some religions in the past demanded human sacrifice.
After a few generations it gets very muddy. Is wicca just something a charlatan made up in the 1800's? Many would disagree. Scientology has several members that are presumably true believers, and several cults have shown the ability to turn people from normies into true believers. So it is not as easy as it seems on the surface. In general, once a religion reaches a critical mass of people who believe in it, it becomes very difficult to dismiss out of hand.
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