A trial is currently taking place in Pennsylvania, in which a local school board is being sued for violating the separation of church and state by its insistence on introducing the concept of "intelligent design" in public schools.  I have blogged on intelligent design before.  Today I just want to add an observation.

    Advocates of intelligent design believe that the complexity of nature is so great that it cannot be accounted for by natural selection (here is a good audio story about the case).   They believe that complexity, self-evidently, can only be explained by some external presence (in this court case they are avoiding the direct invocation of "God") with superior intelligence, a grand orchestrator, a omniscient creator (sure sounds like God…).  The vastness and beauty and diversity of nature must, in their eyes, be the product of an intelligence beyond human capacity.  And they want school children to consider that possibility

    Well, there is another possibility (maybe I should sue to get this idea into the public schools!!).   A Taoist perspective would come to precisely the opposite conclusion: that the infinite complexity of nature is a reflection of the absence of intelligence.  Take this excerpt from the Tao Te Ching, for example:

People all have enough and more.
But I’m abandoned and destitute,
an absolute simpleton, this mind of mine so utterly
muddled and blank.

Others are bright and clear:
I’m dark and murky.
Others are confident and effective:
I’m pensive and withdrawn,
uneasy as boundless seas
or perennial mountain wind.

People all have a purpose in life,
but I’m inept, thoroughly useless and backward.
I’ll never be like other people:
I keep to the nurturing mother. (20)

    The "I" character here is a person who has come close to apprehending Way (the complicated Chinese philosophical term which, for Taoists, means something like the complex totality of nature).  Way is symbolized by "the nurturing mother" which the "I" character keeps to.  The key point here is: to come close to understanding nature, you need to be "muddled and blank."  If you fill up your mind with scientific or religious knowledge, you will never come close to Way.  Moreover, as the natural references ("boundless sea," "mountain wind") here suggest, nature itself is not "intelligent" it is "uneasy," "dark and murky." 

   So, there you have it.  Unintelligent design.  Neither God nor Darwin.  Gee, maybe this could be the compromise in the great church v. state debate here…