Why don't people believe in Pascal's Wager instead of choosing atheism?

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I’m going to try to say something different about this. Yes, Pascal’s Wager is a silly argument when taken at face value. But it’s not so silly when you contemplate a little deeper. Pascal’s Wager in it’s original form concerned Christianity, and their Heaven and Hell.

You can abstract the Wager to instead question why people choose materialism over spiritualism. This question is far more relevant to our times.

Humanity can dream up an infinite variety of metaphysical possibilities. Of these, a certain number of them can be deemed “atheistically compatible,” which is a term of art I’ve concocted to capture the set of ideas to which atheist materialists won’t immediately scoff at. No resurrecting Christs, no demons, no sky fathers, astrology is still stupid, aliens are the constructs of disturbed minds.

One such atheistically compatible idea, (God forbid you call it a belief) is the “blind watchmaker” deity. God is wholly unconcerned with the reality he’s constructed, he just set the universe in motion and went off to do something else. This kind of ‘extra-physical deity’ conception is perfectly compatible with materialism. What it doesn’t give us is an answer to the question of where did that deity come from.

And also provides for things like afterlives. What if the universe was running as a simulation on another computer and we’re all just information. When we die, an algorithm picks up the necessary bits out of our brain and runs them in another program.

But that last question, the one that asks, “well, what the heck is ultimate reality if not the totality of what our scientific instruments can discover,” is going to be what my updated Wager hinges on.