I seem to remember an obnoxious (and now suspended) poster at BioLogos always insisting that one cannot build science on analogies. In that, at least, he was correct - but it’s even more true of theology, where we are looking at the fundamental truth of all things, and the One we worship and glorify.
When (as Darrel Falk did) one starts comparing the personified “Nature” with adolescent children being given their freedom by liberal parents (and therefore suggesting God would be “calling all the shots” if he restricted that liberty), then the informal analogy has become the controller of the doctrine of God. There is an unfashionable word for that, but it has to do with making up ones own idea of God rather than seeking his self-revelation.
The Scriptural picture of nature (meaning all the entities in creation - not a person), and one that was endorsed throughout Christian history by theologians and even by natural philosophers, was that God acts within and through nature to govern his world.
So does it not occur to people that if “Nature” seems to do things more creatively than humans can (which even Aristotle noted with admiration) it is because the sole Creator of Scripture (who says he will not give his glory therein to another) is about his business of creating, and not because nature creates itself unconsciously?
There is no need for the analogy, when our gospel says of Jesus that “The Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him, and without him was not anything made that was made.”
“For by him all things were created, both in the heavens and on earh, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authroities - all thiungs have been created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.”
In the light of that, I say the “valuable analogy” is a flat lie, as well as an incoherent model.
One more word on the “puppetmaster God calling all the shots” analogy, which lies behind the theological preference for open process. God as sole Creator is made (by the rhetoric of the analogy) to look like a tyrant, a micromanager, an unjust interloper on the democratic freedoms of… atoms, I suppose.
For a start, in the beginning there was only God. Unless you’re Thomas Jay Oord, that means nothing was invited to cooperate in creation - it was entirely the work of the Trinity, and that is an entailment of Theism, let alone revealed Christianity.
But fast forward to the hope on which our gospel is built: the new creation, in which the glory of God will fill heaven and earth, and he is “all in all” - even Christ will hand the Kingdom over to his Father, when he has defeated everything that opposes or seeks to usurp God. And that is why God (Son as well as Father) is called Beginning and End, Alpha and Omega, God Almighty.
In other words, if there is anything wrong with the old creation it is that God is too distant from it, not that he’s too interfering.