Doris Lessing's Intelligent Design?

I refer here to the "Canopus" novels of Doris Lessing, of which Shikasta (1979) was the first and most complete in its explication of a system of regular visits and interventions in the Earth's biological evolution and, in particular, in humanity's development.

A fictional system, we may presume. But one that she uses quite brilliantly in Shikasta to suggest a possible explanation for many of the marvelous, fortuitous facts relating to our becoming the colossal, if superficial (in the planetary sense) factor we have become on our planet.

Shikasta is told from the viewpoint, omniscient if ever there were in fiction, of a veteran emissary of Canopus to Earth. This being has been involved with the planetary terra-forming, biological seeding, care and nurture of mammals, apes, and finally us reformed troglodytes (formerly reformed tree-dwellers). So she (for some reason I feel the character is feminine, though the name Lessing gives to the character in the present day is "George Sherban") has been through it all. The book is composed of extracts from the archives the character has reported back to home base over the eons, and particularly in the last 10,000 years or so.

Basically, they (those from Canopus in Argos) started things, along with their junior partner Sirius, who got part of the earth to perform their own experiments (the break-up of Pangaea, with Sirius getting to play with S. America, Australia, and the future Antarctica). There was also a third force, parasitic and jealous of Canopus, that keeps on infiltrating what was once a paradise (protected by Canopean beams of energy from harmful things like meteors, too much heat or cold, or black holes). As a result of these complex and partially malign influences, things have gotten knocked out of balance.

It was (is) sort of like the current Iraq thing, only for better motives (something like: it's what they do, bringing life, etc.) Basically, Canopus has some great powers: its beings basically live forever, can move heaven and earth, mess around with genetics, there's something about crossing dimensions (perhaps a string theory reference?), even a very tricky process to go into human life through the barbaric childbirth process, then heavily influenced by the intoxication of life on Earth, fulfilling their destiny and Canopean guidance by being in the right place, at the right time, for some critical act. That's how they work, mostly, these complex days, but previously they risked direct external appearances.

In our religious legends, they're the angels, the Hindu avatars. The cycle of religious founders that started about 500 B.C. and ended with Muhammad (among which there was an exceptionally perilous outcome in Judea in the first century A.D.) was a phase in their concern for us--a series of warnings to all the lands to change our sinful ways. Despite all their efforts and powers, though, they can't quite fix what has been knocked off kilter, and thus we are in this parlous state.

I don't want to criticize here the Pennsylvania judge who rather decisively threw out the notion that a public school system can teach intelligent design because of church-state separation reasoning. But it seems to me that Lessing's world hypothesis, which can explain so many things, shows that there is a basis other than pure religion to create an intelligent design concept. OK, there's no proof; it's basically a thought piece, which in the other Canopus novels she tries to flesh out with some stories from other planets in the Canopean sphere of influence.

The part I like about it, the nut of truth that drives the whole concept, is the vast similarity between the systems of religion of man. Each of them seems to foolishly (and improbably) believe that it, alone, is right. This reality suggests to her that we are a species that has trouble remembering facts, passing them on coherently, but one that's not forgetting everything, either. She's struggling to make sense of this meta-fact and find the part that could be true behind all the thousands of years of playing "telephone".