Agreed, on all points. But note that if a TE/EC thinker has that understanding of “guide” then the TE/EC will answer “No” to the question “Did God guide evolution?” Yet when Dennis Venema was asked by “Crude” on the BioLogos Forum whether he thought God guided evolution, he did not answer “No”; he instead stretched out the discussion over several days by asking Crude what he meant by “guide.” And though each of Crude’s reformulations made it crystal-clear what he meant by “guide”, still Dennis kept answering obliquely. The question was never answered. This was gamesmanship, not sincere dialogue. We know this for certain, because in many other places on BioLogos, Dennis had made clear his view that, while God could have tinkered with evolution to bring about certain results, Dennis saw no need for God to do so, natural causes of evolution being (in Dennis’s view) sufficient to account for all the results without need of additional tinkering, adjustments, guidance, manipulations, etc. from God. So in other words, Dennis did not believe that God “guided” evolution in the sense you are talking about (introducing a discontinuity), but in his conversation with Crude wouldn’t say so straight out. And if would have been easy; all he had to say was: “If by “guided” you mean, intervened supernaturally, broke the continuity of nature to cause evolution to arrive at a point it would not have arrived at by the usual natural mechanism, then no, I don’t think God guided evolution.” He could have said that at the very start, and saved much time and verbal wrangling. That’s what he would have done, had he been interested in communication, rather than verbal hairsplitting.
Anyhow, I’m not blaming you for an old conversation you weren’t party to, but merely indicating that sometimes claims that one doesn’t understand what the other person means are not credible. And this sort of gamesmanship was a routine feature of responses in the BioLogos Forum all through the Falk/Giberson years, and continued to some extent under Haarsma’s regime. The culture of the place was very defensive, especially whenever a questioner was perceived as representing either ID or creationism.
As for the rest of your answer, it is more philosophically able than anything I ever saw on BioLogos. None of the BioLogos leaders, many of whom had published celebrated books on faith and science, ever rose to the level of articulateness that you have demonstrated in this post, and in many of your other posts. This is all the more striking, as you are much younger than any of them, and they have had in some cases three or four decades of “lead time” on you to read up on theology, philosophy, etc. I would like to see a little more energy and intellectual dedication from people claiming to be able to show that faith and science are not in conflict. A little more reading of Aquinas, Augustine, Luther, Wesley, etc. After all, you are not a philosopher or theologian, but a physicist, but you have been making time to read difficult Thomistic philosophy and theology, and your level of understanding shows this. The BioLogos folks could have done the same. But they never did. (With the usual exception of Ted Davis, and later, Jim Stump.) They seemed to believe in preparing their arguments on the science side, but “winging it” in their arguments on the theology side. It was most frustrating for those who wanted to see high-level conceptual interaction between the fields.
No, your answer does not avoid the question. I wish you were in charge of BioLogos. 