A bit from the Wikipedia article on open theism is, I think, helpful here:
“Nothing that exists or occurs falls outside God’s ordaining will. Nothing, including no evil person or thing or event or deed.”
This fits with how Richard the word “control”, which he has called “heavy handed”. But that is not what I mean by the word; to rephrase the above:
“Nothing that exists or occurs fall outside God’s maintaining will…”
I don’t see any way that the scriptures support the quoted view – which is to say that Calvin was plain wrong. But I also don’t see any way from the scriptures to escape the modified quote, which asserts only that God controls Creation according to the rules He selected, rules that we generally refer to as “natural law”. That is the opposite of “heavy-handed” because it rests on the principle that God is faithful, in this case meaning that He will not (lightly) depart from controlling things according to the rules He chose.
[Of course that leads directly to the old distinction between God’s prescriptive will and His permissive will, i.e. what He mandates and what He allows.]
I had a mathematician brother who could expound on this, though it’s one of those things that I understand while listening carefully but fades away afterwards. Yet he postulated not just “two dimensions of time” but two dimensions each of height, width, and length, and those weren’t absolute but were minimums.
He wouldn’t have to know “the precise trajectory of evolution”, only its constraints (of course this is really VFB). If my university biology-major friend was right that only seven interventions were needed in the course of evolution to guarantee humans then the constraints model is sufficient.
I would characterize this as similar to having a stream flow across a near-level plain consisting all of silt and sand, which results in what’s called a braided stream; a big aspect of a braided stream is that the only thing predictable about its course is that it will be tangled.
Another option is, as above, constraints: Take that near-level plain and add an additional 1° tilt, and then some hills protruding into the plain such that they leave gaps that the river has to flow through, and the result is that while the course of the river in the spaces between those gaps is still chaotic, it can be firmly predicted that the river will flow through the gaps – and if a gap is narrow enough, the prediction can be made that the river will flow through that very specific spot.
To illustrate, we have the Incarnation occurring at what is referred to as “the fullness of time”. In this model, “the fullness of time” would be a narrow gap that the river of events has to flow through – or at least the “river” that is God’s chosen people, since what was happening in China or Australia or the Americas would presumably not be relevant (of course the “fullness of time” concept goes farther than just the Incarnation; it includes the Incarnation occurring in a situation where communication/travel across large distances is reasonably easy along with a scattering of God’s people across those large distances).
Given that “the image of God” is relational, i.e. it designates being the representative(s) of God among Creation, I suspect that any such lifeform would have qualified.