I still don't see how the quotes you provided preclude the action of God in a natural process like evolution, unless you want to espouse a deistic and non-biblical theology of nature by arguing that God's actions are limited to the occasional miraculous intervention.
I never said they were 'limited to occasional miraculous intervention', I am saying that reality includes God acting in time and space. So you just don't see how, ‘being the result of law, and not of miraculous interposition.’ precludes the action of God?
I think you do...
If you're going to argue that evolution is atheistic on that basis, I wonder if you also think the astronomical findings of Laplace (e.g., Laplace's equation, existence of black holes, notion of gravitational collapse) are atheistic, for when he was asked by Napoleon why his description of how the universe works made no mention of God, Laplace said "I have no need for that hypothesis."
You seem like a well read, educated and philosophically adept person Mallon. Let's talk about what an hypothesis is and why an inference of God as the source of a phenomenon is sound epistemology, it should just not be mistaken for empirical science. Bear in mind, that does not make it untrue.
I have not as yet been able to discover the reason for these properties of gravity from phenomena, and I do not feign hypotheses. For whatever is not deduced from the phenomena must be called a hypothesis; and hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, or based on occult qualities, or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy. In this philosophy particular propositions are inferred from the phenomena, and afterwards rendered general by induction.
Hypotheses non fingo
Laplace didn't need a metaphysical hypothesis because there was no basis for that inference. Newton is saying that he is not going to jump to any conclusions about gravity, in other words he is assuming nothing. This inductive philosophy of science was pretty much started by Bacon, Galileo and Kepler and Newton would establish it as the very definition of empirical science.
I know I'm prone to lengthy quotes but I think this one is particularly insightful?
For some years the Royal Society had advocated observation to verify ideas. However, natural philosophers of the seventeenth century had still to realize that, if a series of experiments supported a hypothesis, then a law governing a phenomenon could be established by mathematical derivation from the experimental data. To the 20th century scientist, this is how all science is conducted, it is the modern scientific methord, but Newton was the first to apply the method fully...
...If the arrival of the modern scientific age could be pinpointed to a particular moment and a particular place, it would be 27 April 1676 at the Royal Society, fro it was on that day that the results obtained in a meticulous experiment-the experimentum crucis-were found to fit with the hypothesis, so transforming a hypothesis into a demonstrable theory. ( The Last Sorcerer, Michael White)
That is why Laplace did not need that hypothesis, it need not be inferred from the phenomenon. Creation is another kind of a phenomenon, you are inferring a naturalistic cause for a phenomenon deep in the past that may or may not have actually happened.
Newton inferred a Creator calling God the Intelligent Designer from the things that were made. Science does not get to decide what God does or did not do, when the phenomenon is unknown you don't get to assume the cause is naturalistic. it just doesn't work that way.
Laplace isn't being atheistic, he had a cause he could infer the effect. With Darwin you are leaving the confines of naturalistic and empirical science and sinking into metaphysics. It is Darwinism that is committing the error Newton warned against.