Regarding the title above:
American Majority accepts God-Guided Evolution…
I would call 48% a plurality rather than a majority, but no fundamental objection.
Is this true for BioLogos?
No, because every time the word “guided” has been floated there, there has been massive evasion, from back in the days of Falk and Venema through to the days of Stump and Kramer. And this is true for any equivalent expression – any expression that implies that God is “hands-on” in evolution in a very concrete sense–as opposed to some vague involvement of God in evolution which they carefully avoid specifying–is rejected, avoided, or side-stepped. In contrast, the 48% of Americans you are talking about, who say that God “guides” evolution, understand English words employed in surveys in everyday, not-tricky ways, and assume the survey is talking about something like “intervention” (even if very subtle, at an invisible, submicroscopic level), or some kind of front-loaded setup (a perfect pool shot, as we discussed before). The deliberate vagueness concerning whether God “guided” anything is a modern TE/EC thing. And I don’t think it’s accidental that the vagueness started to become especially pronounced at almost exactly the same time as American TE/ECs declared war on ID.
Typical “answers” to the straightforward question, “Does God guide evolution?” include:
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"Define ‘guide’ ".
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God has ordained a process of evolution.
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Evolution is God’s way of creating.
Note that all of these, in various ways, avoid answering the question.
The first, though seemingly reasonable, is disingenuous, because even when the questioner goes on to define “guide”, the answerer then makes difficulty about that definition, and the questioner then tries to reformulate, and the answerer makes difficulty about that definition, etc., and the question is not answered. Finally, in frustration, the questioner says, “Fine. YOU pick a word which describes God’s relationship to the process, since you don’t like any of mine.” At that point, the answerer either breaks off discussion or gives an answer which does not face the question asked. One might call this “the Venema shuffle” after Dennis Venema, who gave the classic performance of it, in answer to the question of “Crude”, many years ago.
The second response merely says that God gives the orders; it doesn’t say whether or not God had any personal role in carrying them out. So it doesn’t answer the question.
The third has the same problem.
BioLogos is now even less inclined to pursue theoretical discussions than it used to be, so any attempt to pose the question there on the Forum would meet with complete lack of interest. The attempt to harmonize Bios and Logos at the level of theory has been pretty much abandoned.