I think your difficulty in grokking lies in thinking of God as one actor among many in the universe.
Firstly, I would state that the "laws of nature" are not "actors", nor should it be needed to think of them as competitive actors to God. Secondly, if I try to reconstruct my "theology" of the past it would be something like: There was God, there was the natural world existing by the laws of nature, and there were humans with free will.
In the modern state of myself, I can consider or work with any hypothetical (in that I don't accept it) theological state and make conclusions about them, but some of them this site may not like.
In most traditional theistic understanding, all natural processes, including natural selection, are simply patterns in the way God chooses to make things.
(An aside before I address the whole statement, but this sounds distinctively pre-modern and pre-scientific in its understanding of nature. I did not grow up in that world and neither did anyone else around me. We grew up in the world of crop rotation, selective breeding, soil conservation, weather forecasting, chemical pesticides, etc. No one showing up to Mass on Sunday had talismans or shrines in their fields to appease God/spirits.)
Science always describes only the patterns -- it has no test for whether there is a purpose behind them.
And when we look at those patterns, we see things that are regular and built upon fundamental properties. When we examine NaCl crystals they always have the same structure, the same spacing, etc. We can find the same for other salt crystals (like LiF) whose properties only differ because of the numbers of protons in the atoms, and nothing else. Likewise we can continue outward and see the same for all chemicals -- bond lengths, molecular geometry, etc. all set by the deeper properties that do not vary. Or we could build outward.
So, If there are patterns chosen by the way "God chooses to make things" they are all at the deepest level. That is what we see scientifically -- consistency at the non-fundamental level. This includes the application of the same naturalistic patterns to the development of lifeforms. So I come back to my previous statement. If you posit a deity intervening in the process of biological evolution to alter the results to what would have not occurred naturally, how can we call the outcome natural? How is this position not "creationism" if you have a deity creating organisms to fit their whims? It's not the same creationism as the instantaneous appearance creations of YECism, but then neither is ID creationism (generally).
A statistician in the previously introduced novel should conclude that poker hands reflect the natural, random process of shuffling, because if the novelist is careful, they do.
It could, if the novelist bothered to generate the hands randomly, but generally if the outcome of the game matters to the plot we're going to see some distortions, but sure, you could have the statistician character say it is random whether it really is or not.
