The Tao appears as emptiness, with unreplenished hands,
And in its vast profundity ‘tis like the sire of all,
It smoothes the angles in our path, unravels twisted strands,
Softens the glaring light, and fills the clouds of dust that fall.
How pure and still the Tao is! as if it would endure
Forever and forever, oh! whose offspring can it be?
I do not know whose son it is, its birth is so obscure
It seems it might have been before God, in eternity!
— Tao Te Ching IV trans:Heysinger
The Tao Te Ching only mentions God once. Although it insists that we focus ourselves upon the immaterial, the Tao Te Ching is very down-to-earth. As a philosophy on how we ought to live our lives, what it is really saying, in effect, is that we ought to focus upon qualia instead of matter. Qualia, like the Tao, reveals the usefulness of emptiness. The hexagon in a snowflake, is qualia, but it has no material existence, take the snowflake apart and there is no hexagon. Scientists, with their perseveration on matter, dismiss qualia as an illusion, and hence, as non-existent – but the sage knows better!