George, you have the uncanny ability to make simple things unnecessarily difficult.
The pool shot analogy deliberately calls to mind the necessaritarian nature of a pure Laplacean physics. Ideally, a ball struck with force X and imparted a backspin (or top spin) Y, when striking another ball at angle Z, will force the other ball to move, inexorably, along a certain path, with a certain speed, and a certain derived spin. (Of course we always abstract from the imperfection of matter in such analogies, assuming perfect shape and material consistency of the balls, a perfectly co-operative cloth, a perfectly shaped cue tip, etc., even though we know that life isn’t so perfect – but that’s permissible because the point of an analogy is to get a rough idea across.) The mechanistic image of pool balls bouncing around a table and dropping in exactly the intended pockets is meant to suggest the general notion of an initial force applied to an initial setup would yield perfectly predictable results. The whole point of using the metaphor is to give an evolutionary scenario in which God is involved at the beginning, but need not be involved afterwards, provided all natural laws remain the same.
Does Behe himself personally think that God was so detached from evolution as this? I would guess, probably not. But the image he chose does suggest that detachment, and I think deliberately so. I think he is trying to give a logically possible way of thinking about God’s involvement in evolution that would involve no “miracles” or “interventions”.
Of course, Paul Nelson points out that what might be logically possible is not physically possible when you consider the reality of actual pool balls; but we can understand Behe’s image, even if we later decide that evolution couldn’t possibly work that way.
What you are doing is tampering with Behe’s image to turn a remote, pool-shot God into a God more to your liking. But in doing so, you change that image to a different one from the one Behe gave.
All the stuff about Free Will that you stick in shows how far you are willing to alter Behe’s image to suit yourself. Pool balls don’t have free will, so free will doesn’t come into the image, and trying to fit it in does violence to the image.
To make this as simple as possible: If one wanted to suggest a model of evolution where God was intimately involved at various stages, and not just at the beginning, one wouldn’t use a pool shot analogy.
Just to be clear, I’m not championing the pool shot analogy, nor, I suspect, is that analogy Behe’s own private conception of how God is involved in evolution (as opposed to a logical possibility Behe puts out for discussion, for those who hunger for a purely “naturalistic” model of evolution in which God still controls the outcomes). All that I’m saying is that you are distorting the analogy, changing it and retooling it to suit your own theological preferences regarding how God ought to have acted in evolution. And that’s fine – if you say outright that you are modifying Behe’s model to make a better one. But that’s not what you’ve been saying. You’ve been offering your modified model as an interpretation of what Behe meant by the pool shot model. And he didn’t mean that at all.
What I’m complaining about is not your philosophy, or your theology, or your notion of evolution. I’m complaining about your bad exegesis of Behe’s statement.