So far as I understand it, the Tao precedes all deities. That is, the Tao is not itself a deity, but merely the way of things, and the way of things existed before any deities arose. But what do think the Tao is? Are you in agreement with those who equate the Tao with the Abrahamic deity -- or with any deity? If so, why? If not, why not?
In my reading of the Tao Te Ching, it doesn't look like Tao is described as a deity, especially not an anthropomorphized deity. It may be thought of as including consciousness or intention as a fundamental aspect of reality rather than thinking of those things as emergent property of biological minds, in which case some descriptions of deities, like Brahman, may be applicable.
I view their description of Tao essentially as what Hindus view Brahman to be, or what the Stoics refer to as seminal Logos- the mysterious transcendent basis from which all of reality comes into from or perhaps secondary only to nature. It's described as coming before Heaven and Earth, but with the cyclical worldview that Taoism tends to adhere to, that's probably not intended as a literal description of linearity, but instead more of a hierarchy of absoluteness. Whether or to what extent it includes consciousness is probably a point of discussion; Brahman is defined primarily as consciousness itself while Stoic Logos is described as being reason, and Tao seems to be a bit more left open for interpretation.
Even from a non-religious perspective, seeing as how the fabric of spacetime itself and all matter/energy in it apparently expanded from something akin to a mathematical singularity before which the idea of "time" or "space" may not even be applicable, an ambiguous indescribable Tao or Logos is a relevant concept for representing "the way things are". It's a useful term for some element of existence that apparently transcends space and time in a way that a human mind born of spacetime cannot comprehend, and sets the law on which the universe somehow relies on or is born from.
