Steelmanning Zoroaster

Zoroastrianism is true I don't care

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[Update: Professor Nolan has pointed out — rightly — that there’s an issue with describing Angra Mainyu as a ‘God’, in the way I do below, since Zoroastrians don’t call him a God and deny that he’s worship worthy, in the same what that Christians don’t describe Satan as a God or a god, despite his being a powerful and supernatural being with a significant degree of dominion. My use of ‘God’ is the philosophy of religion sense of the term, not a reflection of how Zoroastrians really talk.]

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A while back, I wrote a steelman of Hinduism, which I think I mostly believe.

Today, I am going to switch religions and tell you why Zoroastrianism — a religion widely believed to be false — is in fact true, and not false.

I am a leading expert in Zoroaster’s thought, which is why I will only draw on Daniel Nolan’s <80 page introduction to Zoroastrian philosophy, this being the only book I have ever read on the topic, given that I already know everything.

(To be perfectly candid, I am not a leading expert in Zoroastrian thought, and will probably make a mistake or two. To forestall some criticisms, I am only defending what I take to be a version of something that looks a lot like Zoroastrianism, not every version of the faith or even its dominant strain; if you know a thing or two about Zoroaster¹ and think what I’ve said is unsalvageable, please let me know in the comments.)

This book is open access, probably for a limited time!

According to Zoroaster, there is a fierce struggle taking place between a good deity, who we may call “Ahura Mazda”, and an evil and wrathful spirit, who we may call “Angra Mainyu”.

This first feature of Zoroastrianism is surprisingly philosophically plausible.

The world is messed up in lots of ways, and surprisingly good in others. On the one hand, there are too many bad things to take seriously the idea that there is only one God who is almighty and good. If there were only one God who was almighty and good, we should not expect to see millions of years of evolutionary suffering; a nature red in tooth and claw where carnivory, predation, parasitism, disease, languishing, freezing, and starvation are baked into the system from which we are produced.

Of course, there are ad hoc stories a monotheist can tell as to why the world looks so bad despite being under the constant supervision of an all-powerful, perfect being, stories that invoke simulations and sci-fi stories about aliens caretakers who neglected us due to isolationist space politics. But writing such sub-plots into one’s Book of the World brings down the probability of the overall story, given that it will then contain lots of ad hoc elements that we have no independent reason to accept.

On the other hand, the world is fortuitously and wonderfully made: there is joy and laughter and heart-aching beauty, love and play, solidarity and friendship. If there world was made by an evil god — just one all-powerful, wholly malevolent spirit — the presence of these goods would be a terrific surprise. The evil-god monotheist might equally cook up reverse-theodicies, stories as to why, for some reason, such a dark soul would allow so much light to creep into his torture dungeon; but, as with all comprehensive theodicies for perfect being theism, these stories drag down the probability of evil-god monotheism.

Why not just be an atheist? You can be an atheist if you want, however, there probably is a God, which seems hard to square with atheism. If there is no God, it is a headache to explain psychophysical harmony, nomological harmony, cosmic fine-tuning, the fortuitous correlation between pleasure and objective list goods, moral knowledge, conscious minds, the existence of you, and, I’m starting to wonder, certain plausible claims about vagueness², in one one satisfying and simple swoop.

Why not believe in just one mixed God, like a being whose power cuts off just where fine-tuning ends and evil begins, or a being of mixed moral motives? The answer is not simply simplicity: as friend-of-the-blog Joe Schmid explains in a wonderful video, such strategies often breed hypotheses too imprecise to yield predictions, frequently face the deontological problem of evil to the same degree as monotheism, and are objectionably ad hoc and arbitrary.

To explain the data, we should posit just two simple omni-Gods: one fully evil, one fully good. This explains the mixed moral landscape we observe, without adding more Gods than necessary.

“B-b-but two is more than one, making the theory more c-c-complicated!”