"Beat me to the punch" is merely a common image used to describe one person achieving something first. I think you could cool down a little, someone who's already saying "Well that says a lot!" on his/her second reply to the thread could use a little patience.
Anyways.
Think of it this way. What do we ascribe to God? Take, for example, World War II. If you think about it you will realize that you should be thankful to God that your freedom was preserved in World War II. And yet, for all your thankfulness to God, I could equally argue that the progress of World War II was quite random. After all, who lives and who dies in a battle is really a matter of a stray bullet going a bit too far up or down or fast. As I recall, Hitler served in WWI - if he had been killed on the field, a random occurrence, WWII wouldn't have happened at all. It's chance that Germany didn't have a scientific team fast enough to construct an atom bomb quickly enough, or that the Japanese lost their Pacific supremacy when the US stepped in.
"Not so fast!" LewisWildermuth will protest. "The passage of WWII wasn't random! It was guided by human forces!" And he's right. The Allies won WWII also because their strategists and commanders were simply better. They had better plans and better coordination while Germany had to struggle in a partnership with Italy and Japan who weren't as cooperative. Germany made the mistake of invading Russia in the winter, while it was not just luck but US supremacy that helped them defeat Japan in the Pacific theater - of course, US technology built the nuclear bomb that finished everything.
So by my account, your freedom was defended by chance.
By Lewis' account, your freedom was defended through human action.
Does that mean that you shouldn't thank God that your freedom was defended? Of course not! You would thank God for working both through chance, and through human action, even though there were no miracles involved.
It is the same with evolution. You are essentially asking where God is in evolution.
Some will tell you that evolution is random - and it is really the sum result of a whole lot of events that are
by themselves random, even though the whole has a meaningful direction.
Some will tell you that evolution is not random - it is directed by natural selection and by the adaptation of species to their environment.
But whether you accept one or the other, the fact is that
God is still present. Let me be a bit philosophical for a moment - suppose that
per imposibile, God ceased to exist tomorrow (whatever that means). Would the universe still exist? The Christian answer has been no - the universe depends squarely on God for its creation and every moment of its existence. You cannot figure out how God works in it precisely because you can never exclude God from it. God is everywhere and sustains everything through the power of His Word, by which it was created and for which it exists to glorify. And if evolution is a part of this creation, whether it is caused by random chance or directed by the environment
within creation, it still exists at the mercy of God and to the glorification of God.
