“Random” can mean many things. Particularly relevant for science-faith intersection meanings include:
A strict mathematical sense - something for which the best descriptions are the laws of probability. Will a fair coin be heads or tails when we flip it? Will this radioactive atom decay within the next half-life? Will offspring inherit this allele? What will happen when we cast lots?
A looser sense of “random” is something that is not mathematically random, but is not practically predictable. This includes mathematically chaotic systems (theoretically predictable, but too sensitive to precise details to actually predict thoroughly in practice) and systems that don’t have a known mathematical formula. What will the long-term weather be? What will the long-term course of history be? Will I see someone I know the next time I visit the store?
“Random” is also used to mean “purposeless” or “senseless” - “random violence”. Both atheistic and theistic sources often make the mistake of treating one of the previous senses of “random” as implying this sense. But that is not true. In part, the issue is that what has no purpose at one level of consideration has a purpose at another. For example, Genesis 1 affirms that all natural things and forces are parts of God’s good creation, not gods and monsters and the like. Thus, they do not have plans and goals of their own, but are parts of God’s plan. Science studies the workings of various parts of creation and so cannot detect the overarching purpose from such study. Ecclesiastes describes the difficulty of getting anywhere from such an “under the sun” perspective. However, if we are aware that God does have a purpose in all this, we will appreciate what we learn about science as being a part of God’s good plan, even if we don’t have much of a clue how it fits in. To the Aramean archer, his bowshot was random beyond “the enemy is that way”. But the arrow hit the gap in Ahab’s armor; it was not random to God. Likewise, I can have a purpose in flipping a coin, yet no amount of study of the coin or the laws of physics influencing its motion will help to figure out my purpose in the action.
Thus, examples of all three categories of “randomness” are identified in the Bible as being under God’s control. Obviously, there is a theological spectrum in the degree to which people believe that God determines every detail of what happens versus allowing certain levels of flexibility, or if there is flexibility, how much. I doubt that we are predestined to settle such debates here. Practically, the key Biblical assertions are that we are responsible for our actions and that we are to trust God’s control of things. Denying either aspect causes problems, but formulating how they fit with each other is challenging. For that matter, there is an equivalent atheological spectrum in the degree to which people believe that the laws of nature and the past determine the present, though it is often rather more poorly thought out and selectively applied (the ever-popular approach of blaming fate and blaming others but never taking responsibility oneself). Foolish debates exist claiming that particular experimental evidence favors determinism or indeterminism or that a favored philosophical system
is better supported by determinism or indeterminism. The reality is that one can interpret anything as being part of a deterministic or indeterministic system, and one can spin it in favor of or against other ideas.
But “random” does not mean that God is not in control. There may be a hidden plan behind each seemingly random event, or God’s plan may incorporate some level of flexibility. For example, does quantum uncertainty mean that some things are truly mathematically random, or should we think of it more as a measure of how fuzzy things are on the microscopic scale?
Determinism does not imply that things are pointless, because it implies that the way things happen is a part of the plan. But isn’t it wasteful to plan, for example, for someone to die in infancy? Only if the plan must be fulfilled by living longer. We do not know God’s full plan, and so cannot say, for example, that the panda’s thumb is a bad design. The panda’s thumb is not an ideal engineering solution to maximizing grasping ability (it’s a projection from a wrist bone, not an actual digit.) But that merely suggests that God’s purpose in making pandas was not to create The Amazing Super Thumb ™. Their thumb is good enough to grab enough bamboo for them to survive, and who knows how many other constraints are being balanced?
Evolution includes mathematically random aspects, mathematically chaotic aspects, and aspects with no good mathematical formula known. It is purposeless in the sense that evolution itself is not trying to make humans or otherwise make “progress”. Evolution is merely a pattern in nature and doesn’t have goals of its own, just as gravity does not have goals of its own. (Incidentally, this means that all claims to have “evolutionary” philosophies of how humanity ought to be making progress such as Marxism, eugenics, social Darwinism, etc. are wrong.) But none of that means that evolution implies that God cannot have goals of His own for evolution. If something works, that’s good enough for evolution; it is the fit enough and not just the fittest that survive.
Using games to understand evolution is a helpful approach; I may be able to work some of these into classes.
Because I agree with much of the scenario you propose above, about looking back on the track of our lives. And Open Theism would also agree that God has perfect knowledge of past events, a “superhistorian”. And Open Theism would also agree that God can intervene in time/history to influence events if he wishes (only he cannot override the consequences of the freewill choices he has allowed the other actors or else it wouldn’t be freewill!). Open Theism only asserts that the nature of the future is that it exists as a range of possible trajectories, not as something fixed and knowable at the instant of creation.