u/Educational_Loan3809

I am an Inquirer into Zoroastrianism from a Christian Background and one thing that has given me a headache for quite a while is the way Salvation works or rather doesn't seem to work in Zoroastrianism.

When I was still a Christian, I was troubling myself with analyzing the different schools of theology which the different denominations hold to and which are often in deep disagreement with each other, to the point where they condemn each other as not being true Christians. Historically, there was a lot of violence because of this.

One of the core issues that these bloody disagreements almost always focused on was the issue of Salvation. The central question that all of Christian thinking seems to revolve around is "How can Mankind actually become free of our sins and how can we go to heaven?"

Now from a Christian perspective, this question is harder to answer that it may seem....

You see, the fundamental Idea behind Christianity is that all humans are sinful. We have all committed at least one sin in our life, and in addition to that we have supposedly inherited the "sin of Adam", i.e. the first sin ever committed when Adam and Eve, the first humans, disobeyed God and thereby sinned.

Now the concept of "inherited sin" seems to me to be implausible so this is not what gives me a headache, but what I can't stop thinking about really is how the christian line of thinking continues nonetheless:

According to christian theology, because we have all sinned - even if just a little - God has to take revenge for the sins we committed because otherwise, he would not be a just God. God cannot be just if he does not punish us for our sins and since we all sinned, we all would need to be punished.

But it gets worse: Even if our particular sins are sometimes greater, sometimes smaller (for example lying in an insignificant situation is a smaller sin than murdering someone), it is still the case that every sin, regardless how small it may have been, merits eternal damnation in hell. Why? Well for a few reasons: 1. God himself is perfection and everything and everyone who is not absolutely perfect and pure of sin cannot exist in his presence. But to be in heaven means to be in his presence. Thus, if someone has committed even the smallest sin, he is no longer pure enough to be in heaven.

2. Even small sins are an offense against an infinitely holy God. And because God's holiness is without measure, they gravity of our sins is without measure, even if we are talking about seemingly "insignificant" sins. And because the gravity of our sins is without measure, we have to receive a punishment without measure, thus we have to remain in hell for all eternity.

Now Christians believe that God obviously does not want us to all perish in hell forever. However, God cannot forgive us our sins "just so" because then he would violate his own justice. It would be unjust to forgive us without making us pay some form of retribution of our sins.

So according to Christians, God had to find a way to offer us a way into heaven (a salvation) without having to allow us to go there without satisfying the need for justice. So he sent Jesus, his perfect sinless son, to suffer the penalty for our sins in our stead so that we would no longer have to pay for our sins ourselves. Through Jesus' Sacrifice, we can once again be counted as perfect, sinless and righteous in the eyes of God while at the same times, justice has been served, retribution for all the sins has been made when Jesus died and suffered for us.

So far, so messy.

Now, one of the points that Christians like to really drill into everyone's head is how people who believe that they can go to heaven just by being good people have fallen for a deception. They say that if you think that you can "earn" heaven/salvation by just being a good and ethical person, living an ethical life and doing good deeds, you have forgotten something crucial: All the good things you do cannot "pay off" the punishment that awaits you for the sins you did actually commit. And everyone committed at least one sin in life. So hell is awaiting everyone who is not believing is Jesus and his substitutional sacrifice.

Now why did I explain all this: I explained it because I honestly have trouble refuting it from a zoroastrian perspective. Many Zoroastrians do seem to think that they can go to heaven by just doing good deeds. But how can we answer and refute the christian line of reasoning from a zoroastrian point of view? How would you guys answer?

I have my own ideas but I want to hear from you because you are arguably more well versed in Zoroastrianism than I am.

Edit: I want to thank everyone so far for giving me extensive responses even when I had trouble understanding some concepts and aspects of the things. On the other hand, I wonder about the excessive downvoting of some of my responses to responses. As far as I am aware, the downvoting system was not originally introduced to express disagreement, but to express that a post is somehow inappropriate (because of it's tone, it's concent etc.), but simply saying something that one finds disagreeable should not warrant a downvote. I understand that I made one response in which I accused someone of not having read my entire OP, and I understand that that may come across as bad faith and so I accept the downvotes on this but in other cases, I wonder about the purpose of the downvotes.

_____________________________________

So an argument I heard by a certain online presuppositionalist (iykyk) is that answering the question "does God exist?" with "I don't know for sure" is incoherent if God is defined as being the necessary being. He further argued that claiming not to know either way is an implicit denial of God since not explicitly affirming something that is necessary if it should be the case that it exists is the same as an implicit denial. He put it like this: "Either God is the necessary ground of all existence or he isn't. It is a true dichotomy so answering "neither" is not an option.".

Obviously the first objection to this line of reasoning that I personally could think of was that it may very well be true that God either exists or does not exist but that this does not have to be reflected in my epistemic process. If someones says "I don't know!" then that is not the same as saying "God neither exists nor not exists."

However, for the sake of the argument, I though I'd try to steelman the position that agnosticism is incoherent and what I came up with is something like this: Whatever is necessary existent is not possibly existent but actually existent if it exists. Being necessary entails being actual (and please: Someone with knowledge on modal logic tell me if that's correct). Now, if something that is necessary cannot possibly exist but only either actually exist or actually not exist and saying "I don't know if a necessary being exists." is the same as saying "A necessary being could potentially exist." Then it is indeed that case that agnosticism is incoherent.

My question: Is my reasoning correct and what am I missing (because I am very sure I am missing something)

Btw. in case someone is interested in why this christian presuppositionalist apologist even goes to such a length to "debunk" agnosticism: He usually continues to force self-proclaimed agnostics to "admit" that they actually are hard atheists and then demands positive evidence for the non-existence of god from them. That way, he can prevent the conversation from going down the route of "I am not saying God does not exist but I would need positive evidence of him in order to believe." To which he can then respond by saying "No, since you implicitly believe that god does not exist, it is on you to justify how you can know for sure that he does not exist." It's a very problematic debate tactic but I still thought he has a point with his idea that agnosticism is incoherent.

So, I have encountered various forms of presuppositional christian apologetics on the internet and thought about it extensively and I have to admit - although I am probably earning myself some ridicule by saying this - that I, as an ex-christian, have more trouble finding satisfactory refutations to it than to any other argument that is meant to show that God as Christians conceptualize him exists. Now the question I asked in the title alone can be answered as is, I think, but I would like to spend some words detailing what I am particularly having trouble with and what I feel like I can't properly refute.

I feel like one of the biggest issues with many refutations of presup on the internet (including on this sub) is that they actually strawman presup to a degree. E.g. someone on this sub answered a question about presup a while ago, pointing out that the supposed weakness of presup was that the position simply claims that the christian God needs to be the necessary grounding of all existence, including knowledge, and that disbelief in him disables an individual from properly knowing anything for sure. Hence and individual cannot make any knowledge-claims without belief in the christian God, which renders any argument against said God absurd, because an argument against God presupposes that the same God exists. So far, so correctly characterized. But then he went on to state that it is basically arbitrary by presuppers to assume it has to be specifically the christian God and that all that presuppers rely on is the speculative assertion that there cannot be an alternative grounding to the christian God. But that is not what I heard presuppers argue. They usually argue that, since the grounding of reality has to be necessary, denying it leads to an incoherent world view and that this ground has to be the christian God is a necessary consequence of affirming that there has to be grounding at all. Their argument usually goes along the lines of claiming that reality as it is cannot arise from an impersonal, will-less being and thus, the grounding of reality has to be a personal being with a will and the three "omnis". How exactly they argue for that is irrelevant, my point is that they do make an argument for why is has to be specifically a God as christians conceptualize him while they are often criticized for supposedly not doing so. In fact, I have even heard a presupper try to make an entirely rational argument for the trinity.

Now I didn't just write this to show off, I want to know how to react to this properly. Most reactions I have heard seem to go along the lines of either claiming that the concept of a "grounding of reality" is actually unintelligible, which I frankly just don't understand, so I would appreciate it if someone more sophisticated than me could provide some deeper explanation, or they counter by simply asserting that reality could have aseity/be uncaused/ungrounded. Now this position seems tenable to me (I wouldn't know how to refute it), but from a presuppers view, what comes into play here is the burden of proof problem. Usually, when someone claims that reality just is without any ground or cause or reason, presuppers (or theists in general, in my experience) will demand some evidence of reasoning to support this view and most often, the interlocutor cannot do anything but to assert that the burden of proof is not on them and so it's not an issue if they assume that, out of all options available, the one that requires the least amount of complex assumptions is true (Ockham's Razor). But for a presupper, this obviously is an invalid answer, because he assumes the truth of his worldview first and then expects arguments to the contrary. So my question here would be: Is there a reliable and world-view independent method to showing who has the burden of proof on their shoulder? Because it seems to me that situationally, the burden of proof is always on the shoulders of the person who wants to convince the other person of something. But this is only due to the social dynamics of any debate situation so we cannot accept that as a proper way of figuring out when it is necessary to make a positive argument for a claim vs. just asserting something because of a lack of a better explanation. The latter becomes the fallacy of the argument from ignorance when it may just as well be that there is an unknown better explanation.

Further, one particular strategy that one particular presupper on the internet uses (iykyk) is to claim that agnosticism is incoherent and you either have to be a theist or an atheist, causing you to be in a place of needing to either proof God's existence or to positively disprove it. This is supposedly because if God is the precondition of knowledge, then you have to either affirm that and derive your knowledge from him or reject that and show another source of intelligibility. Even just saying "I am not sure whether knowledge is only possible because of God" makes you an implicit strong atheist because that means that you don't hold to the necessity of God as grounding which means that you hold to the contrary implicitly. Now about this argument: I feel like there is a non-sequitur like jump here when the step is done from "Person A does not positively affirm the necessity of God as grounds for intelligibility" to "Person A implicitly claims that God does not exist and thus takes up the burden of proof for that claim.", but I can't quite put my finger on it. Any ideas how to reliably refute that? Usually, this argument is elaborated by stating that due to the law of excluded middle, it is not possible to assume that one can neither hold to god being necessary explicitly nor not hold to it explicitly without becoming incoherent. Is the only way to answer this to assert one of the Logics which allow for a middle between A and !A. Or is the solution maybe along the lines of saying that being epistemically unsure about one's own ability to recognize what is or is not necessary is not the same as asserting that a being B is either necessary or not? I guess in that case, the presupper would just demand you to enumerate the chain of causation backwards that gets you from the preconditions of your knowledge to an actual knowledge-claim and once you come to the point where you have to say "and from here on, I don't know for sure anymore", they will rub it in your face that they can know something here that you can't and claim victory because you are supposedly being arbitrary. But what to do then?

Anyways, these were a bunch of questions. I would like to end it with a remark concerning potential answers: I am well aware of the fact that presuppositionalism is widely dismissed and ridiculed, not in the least because many of its presenters on the internet are very unpleasant to deal with, to put it lightly. But I still think the argument has something to it especially because it takes a radically different route to it's target than the "usual" evidentiallistic arguments from most apologists and also, presup raises some very needed questions and challanges concerning epistemic certainty and the fundamental nature of reality. Also, the fact that presup is circular is often used to simpyly dismiss it but I do think it is fair of presuppers to demand an explanation as to why circularity should be dismissable in the first place when it comes to meta-logical beings like God. Now different versions of presupp operate differently on this. Some presuppers hold to a conception of God that claims that God is logical in nature. These people cannot defend themselves by saying that the question whether God exists is meta-logical and therefore, circularity is not an issue, but other can who don't hold to that conception of God. I generally don't get why presup is so easily dismissed. Yes, it is a "game", yes, most of it's "users" "run a script" to corner any opponent, but none of that warrants the claim that there is nothing to the argument in the first place. Perhaps the real truth is simply brutal enough to not allow any breathing-space to "us unbelievers" - and I say this as a non-christian myself.

I still think presup is wrong for reasons to be found in a post I made in the r/DebateReligion sub, which can be easily found on my profile, I think,

but these aspects of it bug me nonetheless. Sorry for the long rambling post