Second-tier "social conservative" political blogger Mark Finkelstein recently wrote a blog where he suggested (more or less) that Barack Obama's "true faith" is Pandeism.... I say more or less, since it becomes quickly obvious that Finkelstein really has no idea what correct definition of Pandeism is.... the blog critiques a New York Times column by Gail Collins, which is why it is titled "Happy Pan-Deism Day From Gail Collins".... Collins, so Finkelstein observes, noted the coincidence of Easter and Passover falling in the same week (hardly a surprise since the crucifixion itself was timed from Passover), and quotes the observation from Collins that "Americans with less religious inclinations can look forward to the upcoming Earth Day celebrations, when the president is planning to do something as yet unannounced, but undoubtedly special, and Arbor Day, when rumor has it that he will not just plant a tree, but personally reforest a large swath of the nation of Mali".... following from this Finkelstein relates that "environmentalism has essentially become a religion, and Earth Day effectively a religious holiday. Yesterday's pan-deists, who worshiped trees and brooks, have become members of various environmental groups doing much the same thing. People like Al Gore others, and perhaps the reforesting Obama, have become their latter day shamans."
So, in short, what Finkelstein is saying is that Obama (and Al Gore, and other environmental group members) are pandeists -- and based on his political pedigree, it's pretty clear he means that as an insult (his next comment is "These are the same people who tend to demand the strict separation of church and state. Yet they would have teachers indoctrinate children in their modern-day Church of Gaia in our public schools").... This is irksome on a number of levels.... first off, Finkelstein gets it wrong on several fronts, reducing the reasoned and logic-derived belief that the Creator became the Universe entire to 'worshipping trees and brooks' -- which is in fact doubly wrong.... for one thing, pandeists do not "worship" anything; if we are all part of the Deus, then is useless to worship because the deus is unconscious and wouldn't respond to worship even if it was conscious; and since we are the Deus too, we'd only be worshipping ourselves, which is silly.... and second of all, what we do express a spiritual sentiment of awe towards is not limited to things in Earth's nature, but to the entire Universe, and the delicate balance of physical laws and forces that underlie the greatness of the whole of it.... and yes, we do appreciate trees and brooks, they are often lovely things, and the world would be worse off for their absence from it!! I imagine Finkelstein picturing pandeists joyously dancing naked around a campfire in ceremonies intended to invoke some ancient pagan gods (perhaps even that Greek god, Pan).... well I can assure you, when we do joyously dance naked around a campfire, it's for the inherent fun of it, not to invoke any sort of mythical being, whether the mythology is Greek or Christian.
Now Obama, naturally, is no pandeist.... I seriously doubt Al Gore is either.... it would be great if either of them was, despite my own political differences with both of them, since that would perhaps influence their thinking more in my direction, and more importantly that would bring some much deserved public attention (and no doubt some support) to a belief system that has long been discussed mostly by philosophy professors (and in Germany at that!!), and even among them, often only at the highest levels of the discipline.... I can't tell you how many times someone has described their belief system to me and made clear that Pandeism was what they in fact have long believed without ever knowing it had a name and a community behind it.... more likely, there has never been a pandeist in any high political office -- sure, many among the founding fathers were Deists, the scientific knowledge that justifies Pandeism had not yet been developed and Deism and Pantheism were thought to be philosophies at odds with one another....
Worst of all, and more so than the obvious misconceptions, is the tone which suggests that Finkelstein intends to insult Obama by call him a Pandeist, as though this is some contemptible faith to hold.... I find this odd coming from someone who begins his blog by speaking of the Seder that he will be attending -- after all, why does Finkelstein choose to reject the "divinity of Christ" which marks the mindset of most who share his political orientation? Does he not find the idea of God sending his own son to be sacrificed to absolve mankind of sin (but only those who accept said divinity story) to be equally silly? Does he agree with Ann Coulter's assessment of Christians as 'perfect' and Jews as 'needing to be perfected'? I see now how annoyed Muslims must get when Internet chatter labels Obama a secret Muslim, as though that faith by itself is a shameful thing to belong to.... unreasonable, perhaps -- but shameful? No more than being a Christian, at any rate.... ;)
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
Wishful thinking on Pandeism and Barack Obama
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Thursday, February 12, 2009
Pandeism Fish's roasted fruit recipe
Pandeism Fish's roasted fruit recipe
So lately I've been working on roasted fruit recipes, and my friends have been very complimentary, so I thought I'd share the most successful formula on the Internet for all to enjoy.
Ingredients:
two peaches (or plums)
two apples (or pears)
two tablespoons of raisins
a tablespoon of butter
a teaspoon each of honey and maple syrup
a pinch or two of cinnamon or powdered sugar (or both)
four scoops of vanilla ice cream
Intructions:
1) heat oven to 400 degrees
2) poke holes in the peach and apple skins at half-inch intervals or so with a fork - this keeps the skin from getting peely -- or just skin the fruit if you want, but leaving the skin on makes for a nice mix of textures3) slice the peaches and apples into eight even slices, removing the cores or pits
4) grease an eight inch roasting pan (I usually use Pam, because its handy) and lay the peach and apple slices in the pan
5) sprinkle the fruit with the pinch of cinnamon or powdered suger (I use both), and add the tablespoon of butter
6) Put the pan in the oven for ten minutes
7) While the pan is in the oven, soak the raisins in hot water (tap water will do), after a few minutes, drain the water and you can also sprinkle a pinch of cinnamon on the raisins
8) at the ten minute mark, take the pan out to stir and turn the fruit
9) at this point, add the raisins to the mix, and pour in those teaspoons of honey and maple syrup
10) return to the oven to cook for ten more minutes
11) remove from the oven and dollop over the ice cream with a spoon (best to use a wooden serving spoon)
12) make sure to pour the juices from the pan onto the ice cream too -- the butter, honey, and maple syrup mix in the pan with the fruit juices and make a great sauce
Serves four, and that's all there is to it!!
So lately I've been working on roasted fruit recipes, and my friends have been very complimentary, so I thought I'd share the most successful formula on the Internet for all to enjoy.
Ingredients:
two peaches (or plums)
two apples (or pears)
two tablespoons of raisins
a tablespoon of butter
a teaspoon each of honey and maple syrup
a pinch or two of cinnamon or powdered sugar (or both)
four scoops of vanilla ice cream
Intructions:
1) heat oven to 400 degrees
2) poke holes in the peach and apple skins at half-inch intervals or so with a fork - this keeps the skin from getting peely -- or just skin the fruit if you want, but leaving the skin on makes for a nice mix of textures3) slice the peaches and apples into eight even slices, removing the cores or pits
4) grease an eight inch roasting pan (I usually use Pam, because its handy) and lay the peach and apple slices in the pan
5) sprinkle the fruit with the pinch of cinnamon or powdered suger (I use both), and add the tablespoon of butter
6) Put the pan in the oven for ten minutes
7) While the pan is in the oven, soak the raisins in hot water (tap water will do), after a few minutes, drain the water and you can also sprinkle a pinch of cinnamon on the raisins
8) at the ten minute mark, take the pan out to stir and turn the fruit
9) at this point, add the raisins to the mix, and pour in those teaspoons of honey and maple syrup
10) return to the oven to cook for ten more minutes
11) remove from the oven and dollop over the ice cream with a spoon (best to use a wooden serving spoon)
12) make sure to pour the juices from the pan onto the ice cream too -- the butter, honey, and maple syrup mix in the pan with the fruit juices and make a great sauce
Serves four, and that's all there is to it!!
Monday, March 03, 2008
PanDeism and Faith: the big question!!
Studying Pandeism naturally leads eventually to studying the tenets of both theistic faiths (such as Christianity, Judaism, and Islam), and non-theistic faiths( such as Buddhism and Hinduism).... all of these share some very similar attributes which, interestingly, are best explained by a pandeistic Universe.... for example, all different faiths report miracles and visions of God.... Buddhism/Hinduism report visions of nirvana, from which the world is seen as an illusion, although that can also be understood as seeing the world for the mere collection of God-particles that it must be.... if there were only one true "God" then such miracles and visions should be confined to one faith -- and all of the different faiths can not be correct, because they contradict each other and present incompatible rules and visions....
We are left to ponder a spiritual force in the Universe which is apparently accessible to people from all over with a common denominator of an externalized faith, or some belief system with a spiritual aspect something to substitute for it.... Paul Davies and Karen Armstrong both report some instances in which even some atheists tell of moments which, but for their rejection of theistic-type Gods, they would be tempted to call miraculous!!
The Illusion of Religion:
I think all religions are sort of illusory.... lets say a Christian and a Muslim and a Jew each pray for a loved one to heal from an illness, and in each case their prayer is "answered".... does that mean that NT Bible-God, Koran-God, and OT Bible-God are all real? More likely it means that each person doing the praying is actually themselves manipulating the world around them through the power of their own faith.... of course, more likely than that is that the loved one just happened to get better on their own, since most sick people will be prayed for by someone, and some of them will get better....
I think that Jesus, Buddha, Muhammad, and many other figures accorded mystical power simply had a talent for reaching and manipulating the underlying spiritual force of which the Universe is composed. I don't believe that this ability is necessarily open to everyone, at least not on the same level, just as not everyone who wants to play in the NBA or master physics will ever have the talent to do so, but every once in a long while you get a Michael Jordan or a Stephen Hawking.... it is easy to see how someone with an exceptional talent in touching the presence of God within us might mistake that for God endorsing their views and biases.... it is even easier to see how someone with that talent and a glimpse of a true understanding of the nature of a pandeistic Universe might have great difficulty explaining this concept to others who lacked that vision, but were used to the concept of anthropomorphized tribal gods.... in fact it is more likely the followers who misunderstand the message and put their own biases into its retelling!!
No Religion Offers the "one true path":
So, I don't think any religion is a true path to God, because each of them tries to cordon God off and project the biases of its adherents onto God.... right-wingers are squeemish about gays, so they envision a God who hates gays.... used to be the same with interracial marriage, the people who didn't like it said God was against it!!
Truth is, the Pandeist God (which is after all logically the most likely model of the nature of God) couldn't care less about gays or interracial marriage or any of that.... why would it? It no longer even exists as God!! Here we are, literally occupying the crust of a dustmote in the Universe, probably one of millions of planets where life exists, probably not more than 2/3 of the way towards evolving to the point where we'd be of any use to God, and 80+% of us think God cares what we eat, what we wear, or whether we work on one of the days that we ourselves have artificially segregated into a seven-day block....
In fact I think that atheists are mostly right -- after all, what is it that atheists are rejecting? 99% of it is Bible-God type stuff: accounts of God's jealousy, anger, blood libel, destruction, and inability to deal with things in a subtle manner; accounts of nature and physics that don't stand up in the face of science and reason.... in other words, most of what atheists are rejecting is unreasonable stuff which should be rejected by any person applying logic and reason to understanding the experience of the world!!
Why Pandeism is the logical end of the inquiry:
Now, I'm not saying that atheists are really pandeists at heart, and will one day wake up and discover "the error of their ways" -- this is as insulting a position as saying that there are "no atheists in foxholes".... there are unanswered questions in the Universe, and atheists, deists, pandeists, pantheists, even panentheists and theists are trying to answer that question using some level of reason.... theists and panentheists too easily get caught up in the impossible task of using reason to justify unreasonable scripture; deists offer a reasonable God, but no explanation why God would create the Universe but not interfere thereafter; pantheists offer a reasonable Universe, but no explanation as to why it came into being.... Pantheism was developed prior to knowledge of evolution or the Big Bang, and so tried to account for a constant Universe, not one with a beginning.... I should mention Panendeism also, which presumes a God that created the Universe as part of itself, but (for no purpose that I can fathom) also leaves part of God separate from -- but not interfering with -- the Universe....
This leaves atheism and Pandeism, both of which address the faults of the other systems, both of which explain the origin of the Universe in terms of logic and probability.... between Bible-God (or a Bible-type God) and atheism, it is clearly more reasonable to choose atheism, and this is as much of a choice as many people think they have.... but to those who understand the immense improbability of a Universe coming into existence at all, much less one that supports life and allows me to post blogs on the topic -- between Pandeism and atheism, it is reasonable to choose Pandeism, and so I choose Pandeism!!Sunday, August 26, 2007
Is God a good bowler?
Here's the question....
God goes bowling one day, and on his first roll he makes a perfect strike....
So did God (a) roll the ball all the way down the lane from behind the line and manage to knock down all ten pins without tweaking the path of the ball? Or did God (b) secretly and invisibly guide the ball to the pins, or perhaps even secretly run down there and knock over those pins by hand?
Bear in mind, the lane is unusually long -- it takes billions of years for the ball to roll down it -- but also that God made the ball and the lane and the throw.... you might easily say, what evidence is there that the ball didn't just roll itself? The evidence is simply this: the laws of physics are too fortuitous!! The Universe is too friendly to the sort of complexity that we living, thinking creatures embody, when it could have been otherwise in so many ways.
This analogy is primarily aimed at theists who believe that a God essentially stood next to the pins and knocked them down, a silly conceit designed to puff up human importance in the Universe.... a friend of atheistic persuasion suggested of this analogy that "God knew the outcome of the game before he played it. When the outcome was unfavorable, he modified his swing to create the desired outcome." I'd like to think that, like any bowler, "he modified his swing" to maximize the probability of the desired outcome, and ceased to exercise any control over the ball once it hit the hardwood.... on the other hand, while the bowler is just aiming to knock down a particular set of ten pins, God is aiming to create a Universe in which intelligent life pops up -- anywhere, and at any time.... So I think God has an easier task of it!!
If there are, as my friend goes on to suggest, other Universes, it would make sense that God created all of them for the same purpose!! Since God would have preceded time (which is a function of the Universe) there is no need for God to have been "made", it only had to exist -- and if such an entity existed at any point, then by its nature it would have "always" existed!!
There is only one rational purpose for which a being properly described as "God" would create anything -- to learn something that it can not learn in any other manner.... and what other knowledge could God attain from creating the Universe than the knowledge of limitation, uncertainty, and failure? Curiosity is a rational trait, and I would presume God to be rational (as any intelligent being with complete or substantially complete information would be).... I am certainly as entitled to this presumption as any physicist is to presume that mathematical models of the Universe can be validly projected -- we live in a Universe that appears to be organized rationally rather than randomly; if this Universe has a creator, this creator must be at least some part rational.... indeed, the more we delve into the Universe, the more certain we become that it is entirely rational, and so would support the presumption of an entirely rational creator.
Hence, Pandeism proposes, a rational God becomes the Universe (or, as even as my friend suggests, a collection of Universes), and nothing exists of God outside this Universe (or these Universes).... however many there may be, they are logically designed with physical characteristics that maximize the possibility that complexity will arise, and that life will arise from that complexity, and that intelligent life will ultimately evolve, capable of experiencing and reflecting on its own limitation, thus providing these knowledge-completing experiences to God!!
As to the human purpose served by this speculation, well, what human purpose is served by knowing how black holes work? We can't make them or harness their energy for anything.... but we strive to know what's out there.... if such a God exists, it is something that's "out there"; and if it's a rational being, as is the pandeistic conception of God, then we should eventually be able to discern either its actual existence, or at least the probability of it!!
God goes bowling one day, and on his first roll he makes a perfect strike....
So did God (a) roll the ball all the way down the lane from behind the line and manage to knock down all ten pins without tweaking the path of the ball? Or did God (b) secretly and invisibly guide the ball to the pins, or perhaps even secretly run down there and knock over those pins by hand?
Bear in mind, the lane is unusually long -- it takes billions of years for the ball to roll down it -- but also that God made the ball and the lane and the throw.... you might easily say, what evidence is there that the ball didn't just roll itself? The evidence is simply this: the laws of physics are too fortuitous!! The Universe is too friendly to the sort of complexity that we living, thinking creatures embody, when it could have been otherwise in so many ways.
This analogy is primarily aimed at theists who believe that a God essentially stood next to the pins and knocked them down, a silly conceit designed to puff up human importance in the Universe.... a friend of atheistic persuasion suggested of this analogy that "God knew the outcome of the game before he played it. When the outcome was unfavorable, he modified his swing to create the desired outcome." I'd like to think that, like any bowler, "he modified his swing" to maximize the probability of the desired outcome, and ceased to exercise any control over the ball once it hit the hardwood.... on the other hand, while the bowler is just aiming to knock down a particular set of ten pins, God is aiming to create a Universe in which intelligent life pops up -- anywhere, and at any time.... So I think God has an easier task of it!!
If there are, as my friend goes on to suggest, other Universes, it would make sense that God created all of them for the same purpose!! Since God would have preceded time (which is a function of the Universe) there is no need for God to have been "made", it only had to exist -- and if such an entity existed at any point, then by its nature it would have "always" existed!!
There is only one rational purpose for which a being properly described as "God" would create anything -- to learn something that it can not learn in any other manner.... and what other knowledge could God attain from creating the Universe than the knowledge of limitation, uncertainty, and failure? Curiosity is a rational trait, and I would presume God to be rational (as any intelligent being with complete or substantially complete information would be).... I am certainly as entitled to this presumption as any physicist is to presume that mathematical models of the Universe can be validly projected -- we live in a Universe that appears to be organized rationally rather than randomly; if this Universe has a creator, this creator must be at least some part rational.... indeed, the more we delve into the Universe, the more certain we become that it is entirely rational, and so would support the presumption of an entirely rational creator.
Hence, Pandeism proposes, a rational God becomes the Universe (or, as even as my friend suggests, a collection of Universes), and nothing exists of God outside this Universe (or these Universes).... however many there may be, they are logically designed with physical characteristics that maximize the possibility that complexity will arise, and that life will arise from that complexity, and that intelligent life will ultimately evolve, capable of experiencing and reflecting on its own limitation, thus providing these knowledge-completing experiences to God!!
As to the human purpose served by this speculation, well, what human purpose is served by knowing how black holes work? We can't make them or harness their energy for anything.... but we strive to know what's out there.... if such a God exists, it is something that's "out there"; and if it's a rational being, as is the pandeistic conception of God, then we should eventually be able to discern either its actual existence, or at least the probability of it!!
Tuesday, July 10, 2007
PanDeism explains why the Universe has so many galaxies and stars!!
A friend asked why God bothered to spend the extra effort required to make galaxies of stars and planets, which we may never visit -- indeed, which we may never even see!! Here PanDeism provides an answer where other faiths are stunted by their belief that we'll meet our collective end bound upon this mossy rock....
If you've read my blogs to this point, you will doubtless have seen how examination of the Universe through a series of logical steps suggests that God became the Universe in order to share in the experience of life therein.... remember, now, that God basically blew itself up (albeit temporarily) in the Big Bang that started it all, so God is thereafter not around to guide life into existence, and must count on that happening on its own according to the laws of physics written into the Universe at the Creation.... therefore, PanDeism finds, the Universe is designed by its natural laws to facilitate abiogenesis and evolution by natural selection leading to the development of self-reflective intelligent life (and probably life with an even higher form of awareness to which we have simply not yet evolved)....
Really, then, there are two distinct driving factors behind the scope of the Creation:
First, God sought to create a Universe that would maximize the instances of intelligent life developing without need of further intervention from God.... the bigger the Universe, the more places in which this might occur.... so it is bound to be the case that life exists in other solar systems, perhaps in this galaxy, perhaps in others, but life that is equally likely to travel to other stars.... and moreso, the Universe is made in the way that it had to be in order to maximize the possibility of intelligent life arising; therefore, the distances between the stars and the galaxies are just a side-effect of the laws of physics needed to achieve the first purpose.... sort of like making a pile of dirty pots and pans and dishes and utensils is not the goal when you set out to bake a cake for your friends to enjoy, but between the mixing and the baking and the eating, that's what you are going to end up with....
Second, in order for God to gain the maximum benefit of sharing in this experience, life must blossom and spread throughout a large portion of the Universe.... hence, a big Universe full of wonder and beauty gives its inhabitants many opportunities to discover and feel awed at the sight of things within the Universe, feelings which God shares with us.... and perhaps fewer things will inspire more wonder than the meeting of two civilizations, each an alien to the other, hopefully in a spirit of peace....
Though this may not happen in my lifetime, I have high hopes for the destiny of mankind to be shaped among the stars.... the distances indeed may only seem insurmountable.... if you were to explain to an ancient Greek exactly how far away the moon actually is, and what lays between earth and moon, they might well conclude that such a barrier could never be bridged (in fact when Galileo errantly proposed that there were civilizations on the Moon, the Church worried that this contradicted the Biblical account of the flood of Noah destroying all mankind)!! But this is a technical question, one that will be solved, I think, by a technical answer.... and though I think the distance is incidental, I also think that God intended us to be presented with a Universe full of challenges to be overcome, so that God's knowledge of the overcoming of challenge could be most fully completed!!
Just as humans have long interpreted an internal longing for God as a sign of God's existence, so I believe is the internal longing of many to believe in life on other worlds in fact a subconscious reception on our part of the beacons of sentience originating on those far-away orbs, dangling about their own flaming suns!!
In short, once again PanDeism explains it all!!
If you've read my blogs to this point, you will doubtless have seen how examination of the Universe through a series of logical steps suggests that God became the Universe in order to share in the experience of life therein.... remember, now, that God basically blew itself up (albeit temporarily) in the Big Bang that started it all, so God is thereafter not around to guide life into existence, and must count on that happening on its own according to the laws of physics written into the Universe at the Creation.... therefore, PanDeism finds, the Universe is designed by its natural laws to facilitate abiogenesis and evolution by natural selection leading to the development of self-reflective intelligent life (and probably life with an even higher form of awareness to which we have simply not yet evolved)....
Really, then, there are two distinct driving factors behind the scope of the Creation:
First, God sought to create a Universe that would maximize the instances of intelligent life developing without need of further intervention from God.... the bigger the Universe, the more places in which this might occur.... so it is bound to be the case that life exists in other solar systems, perhaps in this galaxy, perhaps in others, but life that is equally likely to travel to other stars.... and moreso, the Universe is made in the way that it had to be in order to maximize the possibility of intelligent life arising; therefore, the distances between the stars and the galaxies are just a side-effect of the laws of physics needed to achieve the first purpose.... sort of like making a pile of dirty pots and pans and dishes and utensils is not the goal when you set out to bake a cake for your friends to enjoy, but between the mixing and the baking and the eating, that's what you are going to end up with....
Second, in order for God to gain the maximum benefit of sharing in this experience, life must blossom and spread throughout a large portion of the Universe.... hence, a big Universe full of wonder and beauty gives its inhabitants many opportunities to discover and feel awed at the sight of things within the Universe, feelings which God shares with us.... and perhaps fewer things will inspire more wonder than the meeting of two civilizations, each an alien to the other, hopefully in a spirit of peace....
Though this may not happen in my lifetime, I have high hopes for the destiny of mankind to be shaped among the stars.... the distances indeed may only seem insurmountable.... if you were to explain to an ancient Greek exactly how far away the moon actually is, and what lays between earth and moon, they might well conclude that such a barrier could never be bridged (in fact when Galileo errantly proposed that there were civilizations on the Moon, the Church worried that this contradicted the Biblical account of the flood of Noah destroying all mankind)!! But this is a technical question, one that will be solved, I think, by a technical answer.... and though I think the distance is incidental, I also think that God intended us to be presented with a Universe full of challenges to be overcome, so that God's knowledge of the overcoming of challenge could be most fully completed!!
Just as humans have long interpreted an internal longing for God as a sign of God's existence, so I believe is the internal longing of many to believe in life on other worlds in fact a subconscious reception on our part of the beacons of sentience originating on those far-away orbs, dangling about their own flaming suns!!
In short, once again PanDeism explains it all!!
Friday, May 25, 2007
One Universe, everything that is goes in; everything that is needed comes out!!
I've been thinking over this question for some time.... a friend argued that PanDeism could not be true because a Creator who wanted to experience everything that could possibly be eperienced would have to create an infinite number of Universes to carry out this plan.... the basic example being that our Creator could not know how it feels to be Stephen Jay Gould at the age of seven standing on the edge of Ayers Rock, Australia, because Stephen Jay Gould was never even in Australia in his seventh year -- therefore a Creator becoming the Universe to fulfill such experiences is useless unless such Creator is capable of making an infinite number of Universes, and was therefore already an infinite being....
Something about the question itself struck me as wrong. Took a while to put my finger on it exactly, but here it is: our Creator isn't looking to learn how someone with Stephen Jay Gould's experiences and memories and perspective at age 7 feels when gazing down from Ayer's rock.... our Creator isn't looking to experience every possible combination of interactions that can possibly be experienced by any possible being that might ever exist; rather, our Creator is looking to learn what it is like to experience those things that our Creator can not experience prior to the existence of a Universe where these things occur (e.g. feeling awe when looking down from Ayer's rock)....
The reason our Creator doesn't need to feel everything is the same reason we don't memorize every possible fraction between 1 and 2.... once we know 1 and 2 and how fractions work, we can extrapolate what's in between.... once we know that 1/8 is greater than 1/9 is greater than 1/10, we need not go furtherdown this progression to understand what the next number would be.... if you were to win $1,725,251 in the lottery tomorrow, would you really feel any different than if you were to win $1,725,252?
There is simply no need for our Creator to have "infinite" experiences, because experiences are like points on a range, maybe like points on the outside of an n-dimensional object.... if you have two or three points in space, they may look like they are just out there, floating unconnected; if you have 100, you may see that these points are the boundaries of some kind of a shape; if you have 10,000, you will clearly be able to make out a sphere, and where there are empty spaces (which there must be, because we're only talking about points here) you can pretty much figure out where a point in such a space would go by looking at the relationships between all the other points around the sphere in general, and then the relationship between the local points near that spot.... if the surface of the sphere has a texture or a pattern of colors or a degree of luminosity (or all of these features, or even an ever-changing medley of these features) you can figure out what color, feel, rate of movement, and other characteristics wil be ascribable to any point by learning what experiences befall the points in general, and the points in that area....
Before the Universe exists, our Creator can't know how it feels for anyone to look down from Ayers rock at any age!! It can't know how it feels to be in awe of anything, because nothing exists that it could be in awe of, so the only way it could know what awe feels like is to create a Universe containing (a) beings capable of being in awe of things and (b) things that such beings would indeed be in awe of.... however, our Creator does not need any particular beings feelings of awe, just the feelings felt by enough beings (however random) to know how any kind of awe is likely to feel (in a sense to eliminate the extreme outliars, to be sure that there is no unique feeling that can not be estimated but is nonetheless not captured or approached in anyone's experience of the Universe.... however, PanDeism requires at the outset the concession that our Creator can not be all-knowing, because if it were, there would be no need to create the Universe, hence no Universe created!!
The experiences that our Creator is seeking may be many times more layered even than the example of the colorful and active sphere noted above, but there are many billions of people, and every single one of us has had literally millions of experiences (every moment of our lives is a new experience, really).... not to mention the likely life forms in other galaxies, and even the experiences of animal life on Earth.... so our Creator need not make infinite universes, if existing as this one Universe for the course of its existence will provide all the points that our Creator could possibly need to understand (either by direct sharing of experiences or by extrapolation from the closest similar experiences) how it feels to be in just about any possible situation!!
In other words, our Creator already knows everything about how it feels to be Stephen Jay Gould at age 7, and it knows how it feels to be looking down from Ayer's rock (and probably someone has looked down from Ayer's rock at age 7, or from some edifice of comparable magnificence at some comparable age) so our Creator can estimate from the perspective of perhaps tens of thousands who have had similar enough experiences to know almost certainly how it would feel to be Stephen Jay Gould looking down from Ayer's rock, aged 7....
And so: One Universe, everything that is goes into it; everything that is needed comes out!!
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