Why not deism?

[Porcupine]

What made you think that the universe had a will to begin with?

Because the universe is most likely a mind and minds tend to have wills.

But although I recognized that the universe's mind is not like ours it didn't, before, occur to me that its therefore not likely to have a will because wills seem to not just be innate properties of minds: wills seem to be evolved properties of complex minds.

I mean, to be fair to myself I saw the universe's mind in terms of its thoughts being basically our minds, and the minds of other beings, big and small, complex and simple .... that made up a bigger mind overall ... but, still, I'm not sure what it would mean to say that the universe has a unified will. But then even our wills are not always unified. So it's confusing.

I guess, one way of putting it is that if the universe has a will it may not have a will in addition to the wills of smaller beings that are part of it ... and if it does have a will in addition to those wills then its will may be so different that there isn't really any meaningful sense in which we can call it a will. I'm not sure if the universe wills anything because I'm not sure if the universe wants anything ... apart from the trivial fact that our wills, and the wills of other beings, are part of it. Although wills can be conflicted I think it's really one will per being. Many desires but one will. And for that reason I guess the universe either has a will completely unlike our own so as to make the word "will" meaningless in such a case or the universe, in and of itself, doesn't have a will at all.

---

pantheism is too vague and can be easily taken to mean theism, deism or atheism.

Yeah, I agree, and that was my eventual conclusion as well. And I only briefly used the term after realizing that some people didn't like my use of the words "deism" and "deist" because it was hard to explain why I didn't consider the god I believed in to qualify as interventionist.

If I knew of a term that meant pantheism + a cosmic mind then I would use that.