Yesterday, before London distracted my attention, I noticed that the Catholic church’s notion of intelligent design had found its way onto the New York Times op-ed page. Then, this morning, NPR had a piece on how scientists avoid engaging advocates of intelligent design in debate. And now I notice, over at the TPM Cafe, that the New Republic interviewed a series of conservative commentators and only a minority (6/15) came out unequivocally supportive of the teaching of evolution in the schools. So, I guess it is time to comment on intelligent design.
Confucius would not have much to say – it is one of those other worldly questions that he avoids. But Taoists would clearly be befuddled (aren’t they always!) about the whole thing.
From what I can gather, intelligent designers believe they can discern certain patterns and order in Nature, and that this order is so regular and perfect that it must be the product of some source of intelligence, usually a singular God.
Right away, the Taoist notion of "Way" is relevant, since it is an attempt to put a word to the complex totality of Nature. This passage is from the Tao Te Ching (34).
Way is vast, a flood so utterly vast it’s flowing everywhere.
The ten thousand things depend on it: giving them life and never leaving them it performs wonders but remains nameless.
Feeding and clothing the ten thousand things without ruling over them, perennially that free of desire, it’s small in name. And being what the ten thousand things return to without ruling over them, it’s vast in name.
It never makes itself vast and so becomes utterly vast.
So, "Way" comes close to what we mean by "Nature." It is everywhere, giving sustenance to everything (the "ten thousand things"). Yet it does this without "ruling over" things. It defines our efforts to put words to it: encompassing the opposites of "small" and "vast" at the same time.
Is it God? Not really. Chinese cosmology, at the time the Tao Te Ching came together as a text, did not invoke or rely upon an all-powerful, all-knowing anthropomorphic God. The world-view was more open-ended, recognizing "an ordered harmony of will without an ordainer" (Mote, p. 20).
There was a certain "order" to things, to Way, but it was not expressed in a natural law or a consistent principle or a durable structure. It was more of a flow, a coincidence of movement and action and change. Here is how Chuang Tzu explains it, while adding in a human dimension:
Joy and anger, sorrow and delight, hope and regret, doubt and ardor, diffidence and abandon, candor and reserve: it’s all music rising out of emptiness, mushrooms appearing out of mist. Day and night come and go, but who knows where it all begins. It is! It just is! If you understand this day in and day out, you inhabit the very source of it all.
Whatever "design" there might be in nature, then, is not "intelligent". It is! It just is!… it’s all music rising out of emptiness. Indeed, both Chuang Tzu and Lao Tzu would scoff at the idea that intelligence – for them a feeble human attribute – could capture the vastness of Way. It is beyond our intelligence and there is no godly intelligence to control any such design.
In the end, Taoists would reject the notion of intelligent design. But they would also reject the idea that any human theory, evolution included, could encompass Way.
So we are left with a question: what is it about us that fires the need to find intelligence in nature? Why can’t we just accept it as beyond us?
The Useless Tree 
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