Bethany
I think that, at least before Descartes decided animals were mere automata, there’s always been some concept that there is a heirarchy of “volition”. But the point must be that it is a heirarchy: one’s ox, like Israel, might be seen as stiff-necked and stubborn, or obedient and willing, and therefore in some sense and degree possessing a will.
But earthworms were correspondingly less likely to spring surprise choices - I strongly suspect that whoever coined the ancient proverb about worms turning was thinking more of a cornered snake than a self-willed annelid.
Now we have a better understanding of how “choice” relates to anatomy and physiology: and by any standard the choices available to an earthworm are stricty limited compared to that of a human being. If the nature of a worm’s nervous system gives it the capacity to differentiate food sources (which zoologically I would suggest is about it), then that capacity of “choice” indeed is part of the fabric God has created in the building of his world, and even more so for the mammal moulding its environment.
But what about the capacities of a bacterium? It has no nervous system. As far back as Lamarck, the realisation that there was a clear distinction between the “volitional” activity of the “infusoria” - its basic desires, in other words, driven by invariant needs and responses - and the increasing options afforded by evolution only in the higher animals and, far more, mankind. Does the bacterium’s nature endow it with any significant capacity of choice? Really? It serves its maker by being what it is, surely, not by creating new ways to serve him.
Even more relevantly for BioLogos, what about things that are not organisms at all, like “genetic material”, or “the process of evolution” or “Nature”? Organisms undergo evolution from the effects of an insentient chemistry and an unconscious environment, not by making decisions (at least until we get to higher animals and niche construction theory, which isn’t mainstream). When we start to talk about “creative freedom” there, we’re pretty close to considering rocks as having free will, and panpsychism.
So if we look at this scientifically (or theologically), rather than poetically, we surely have to ask what it is that differentiates a human from an earthworm: and a big part of that is orders of magnitude more freedom of will and action, correlated with a vastly different nervous system. The image of God may not only refer to capacity for responsible choice, but it presupposes it. We might well validly put dolphins and elephants closer to us than to the worm - but we’d be foolish to speak of “choice” as a universal property of life, regardless of biology, and more foolish still to turn “evolution” by inanimate processes into a quasi-creature with the capacity to “choose” the direction the world goes in.
Or if we do, we have to explain why that isn’t panpsychism.