Pascal's wager works as long as you think there is a reasonable chance of the Christian god existing. This would have been true in Pascal's time when everyone a

Pascal's wager works as long as you think there is a reasonable chance of the Christian god existing. This would have been true in Pascal's time when everyone around you believed, and much of the knowledge we take for granted didn't exist. E.g. the theory of evolution, or any understanding of physics, etc. The stronger version of the argument also is true provided you only care about maximizing expected utility. That is any finitely small probability that god exists times the infinite negative or positive utility of believing/not believing, and you the expected utility of believing is infinite. The counter is "maybe there is a god but he punishes believers and rewards atheists." As long as the probabilities are exactly equal, they perfectly cancel each other out. However if they aren't exactly equal, if the probability of the Christian god is even slightly higher, then it will vastly overwhelm the expected utility calculation. The consequence of this is you can go up to someone who believes in maximizing expected utility and say "I am a god. If you don't do what I say I will torture you for an infinite amount of time. If you think there as an even tiny probability that what I'm saying is correct, you must obey me." It doesn't just apply to the Christian god or even religion. Thus expected utility maximization may not actually be the best way to make decisions.