What if there IS no "physical cause?" Have you ever entertained that possibility?
What if the driver of evolution is actually a spiritual cause?
Which is do believe is what Genesis 1 asserts. Physical, "material" nature does not show up until Genesis 2.
So, what is going on in Genesis 1? To me, it is the spiritual layout, or blueprint, for what ensues in Genesis 2. The analogy from physics is that Genesis 1 refers to whatever was loaded into the Singularity — the Word of God, Logos Alpha to Omega — In the Beginning.
The "Logos Alpha–Omega" part guarantees that our universe, as created by God, was originally designed to unfold — or "evolve" — in physical space and time. Indeed, that was God's Plan in the Beginning. That He already knows the End — the purpose and goal of His Creation — does not affect its free development "In-Between" its Beginning and End, which has been called (by Aristotle), the Immanent Cause of everything that happens, or could happen, in physical Nature.
In other words, God did not create an "overly-determined" universe. There are rules and guides to the system; but within those constraints, there is every possible scope for novelty to emerge in physical nature, via an evolutionary process.
An analogy from physics: the relations between the first and second laws of thermodynamics. The first law — "matter cannot be either created nor destroyed" — is a conservation principle. It refers to that which does not ever change over time. It is, in short, a universal principle.
The second law — the law of entropy — refers to that in nature which is capable of changing. Note the second law holds that all systems in nature have an inherent tendency to become disordered over time. And all would do so, if there were no other operative principle in the universe to counteract this tendency.
BTW, the Singularity was "discovered" by Monsignor Georges Henri Joseph Édouard Lemaître, a Jesuit priest. The Singularity is what "blew up" in the Big Bang; and evidently is the basic foundation for the inflationary expansion of the universe ever since — which is decidedly an evolutionary process in space and time.
But of course, Lemaître was perhaps just another superstitious Christian creationist in your book. Maybe we can also say this of Gregor Mendel, an Augustinian monk who just happens to be the father of the science of genetics, which gave Darwin so many bright ideas.
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Anyhoot, I don't know if any of the above is at all helpful to you, dear allmendream. All I can say is I'm not here to "tell you what to think," but rather to "show you where to look." You can go look if you want to.
I do hope you will, dear brother in Christ! Thank you ever so much for writing!
What a shame that creationism contributes nothing of value to science.
Maybe someone should have told Newton that as well.
At no point did he claim that God had to intervene mystically magically miraculously or spiritually in order for wrinkled pods and smooth pod pea crosses to reproduce 3/4th’s smooth pods and 1/4th wrinkled pods. He proposed that it was something physical within the pea that was being held hidden in the first cross that came out in 1/4th of the offspring in the second generation.
And we now know what it was that was physically within the pea waiting to be expressed in subsequent generations - DNA.
If the evolution you accept has no physical cause then it is as useless as the rest of creationism and can lead nowhere and to nothing - exactly where you left it and seem content to leave it - unproductive and useless.