It makes slightly more sense from you than any other reply I’ve got over the past nine years at BioLogos. Most of the major proponents of free creation have failed even to answer such questions: a few like Karl Giberson have conceded under pressure that by “freedom” they actually only mean “randomness.” That’s not so much theologically shallow as linguistically challenged.
But to my mind it personifies what is being conceived as a blind process: neither adaptive nor neutral evolution can meaningfully be said to be an “activity” of species “exploring” anything, let alone doing so “creatively.” Species, unless we follow Jim Shapiro’s route, do all they can to avoid genetic mutation, and it’s their failures that cause mutations. So if they create it’s by accident.
If for “species” one substitutes the evolutionary process itself, one has attributed creativity to a mere concept.
It’s not clear to me how such a process would be likely result in “man created in the image of God” (let alone the other species for which God takes full credit in Scripture) - which is why, I suppose, free process theism tends to replace God as Creator with God as delighted observer of an evolutionary demiurge’s products.
I can’t see how it’s even intellectually coherent, quite apart from being an account of the Trinitarian God as Creator of all things in heaven and earth.