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!!