My story has some similarities and differences. A lot of that can be found here where I do a commentary on Collins’ book. But as quick-and-dirty summary… I was not raised Christian but started out completely in the scientific worldview and remain dedicated to science (with a masters degree in physics). I have simply found value in the Christian worldview as well.
That btw is a significant difference to me. I have always considered atheism a viable and rational option. So my choice for Christianity is not at all a matter of desperation. And to be frank, it is pretty intellectual because my character is one-sided in that regards most ways.
We are a collection of individuals who believe a great many different things about how to bring the Bible and evolution together into a coherent picture. Explore the ideas different people have and it is most natural that you will put together a picture of your own on how to do this which best satisfies your own way of thinking.
I believe that design and life are at opposite ends of a spectrum. We are rapidly approaching the point where we will master the biological machinery of how our bodies work to the point where we will design our own things using this machinery for medical purposes. It is my position that this will not create living organisms because self-organization and evolution is what makes us/things alive in the first place and so anything we design will by definition be a machine.
As a theist I certainly believe in God’s active involvement in everything and evolution is no different than our own lives. But there is a difference between a watchmaker designer of machines and a shepherd or teacher who involve themselves in the life of a living organism to contribute to their development. It think that all the recent evidence is pointing to the realization that design isn’t really such a divine attribute but something which machines can actually do better than human beings. Thus looking for God in an intelligent designer is looking for God in the wrong place.
Evolution which can be modeled on a computer in learning AI and evolutionary algorithms definitely uses randomness as part of the process. The same process in the real world with quantum physics is therefore not deterministic (not within the premises of the scientific worldview anyway). However, at the same time is it far from purely random either, but so highly filtered that it can home in on sophisticated and highly tuned solutions to complex problems. If you like, you can credit God with the genius that uses such a methodology which we are only now beginning to explore the power of.
So God’s involvement? The exact course of events in our lives is not determined by pre-existing conditions and logically there is plenty of room for something outside the scientific worldview to be involved. But when we insist on the premises of the scientific worldview, which includes time-ordered causality, such involvement is going look like events which are random or without cause. So while I don’t believe that God is interfering directly with the self-organizing process of life, there are events like the one which wiped out the dinosaurs which I certainly believe God had a hand in bringing about.