You’re combining two reasons for believing: Pascal’s Wager, and popularity (that many people already believe). That way, you try to avoid a pure Pascal’s Mugging, but if the mugger can claim to have successfully mugged many people in the past, then you’ll submit to the mugging. You’ll believe in a religion if it has Heaven and Hell in it, but only if it’s also popular enough.
You’re updating on the evidence that many people believe in a religion, but it’s unclear what it’s evidence for. How did most people come to believe in their religion? They can’t have followed your decision procedure, because it only tells you to believe in popular religions, and every religion historically started out small and unpopular.
So for your argument to work, you must believe that the truth of a religion is a strong positive cause of people believing in it. (It can’t be overwhelmingly strong, though, since no religion has or has had a large majority of the world believing in it.)
But if people can somehow detect or deduce the truth of a religion on their own—and moreover, billions of people can do so (in the case of the biggest religions) - then you should be able to do so as well.
Therefore I suggest you try to decide on the truth of a religion directly, the way those other people did. Pascal’s Wager can at most bias you in favour of religions with Hell in them, but you still need some unrelated evidence for their truth, or else you fall prey to Pascal’s Mugging.
You’re combining two reasons for believing: Pascal’s Wager, and popularity (that many people already believe). That way, you try to avoid a pure Pascal’s Mugging, but if the mugger can claim to have successfully mugged many people in the past, then you’ll submit to the mugging. You’ll believe in a religion if it has Heaven and Hell in it, but only if it’s also popular enough.
You’re updating on the evidence that many people believe in a religion, but it’s unclear what it’s evidence for. How did most people come to believe in their religion? They can’t have followed your decision procedure, because it only tells you to believe in popular religions, and every religion historically started out small and unpopular.
So for your argument to work, you must believe that the truth of a religion is a strong positive cause of people believing in it. (It can’t be overwhelmingly strong, though, since no religion has or has had a large majority of the world believing in it.)
But if people can somehow detect or deduce the truth of a religion on their own—and moreover, billions of people can do so (in the case of the biggest religions) - then you should be able to do so as well.
Therefore I suggest you try to decide on the truth of a religion directly, the way those other people did. Pascal’s Wager can at most bias you in favour of religions with Hell in them, but you still need some unrelated evidence for their truth, or else you fall prey to Pascal’s Mugging.