If you accept that God, or another designer, put a mechanism in place that took millions of years to reach existing forms of life, then you're subscribing to evolution. As Oscar Wilde said, you're just haggling over the price.
This universe seems to tend toward life and awareness, two very great mysteries. The scientists say this is all just the result of random physical interactions, and I say hooey. A universe that can be aware of itself is more than random.
That argument reminds me of Douglas Adams' comparison of man to a puddle in a pothole. The puddle is in awe of the miracle that someone or something created a pothole in exactly his size and shape, never pausing to consider that he might have been formed in such a way as to conform to the pothole.
The available evidence does not -- at least yet -- support the hypothesis that the universe tends toward life and awareness. Out of an unfathomable number of worlds in our universe, without even getting into the potential number of past, present and future universes, we know of precisely one that supports life and intelligence. A lone data point cannot define a pattern.
I see the problem as an insistence that God is a very personal Creator, almost a human figure. God by any religion's definition is an all knowing all powerful mystical being whose nature and power are beyond anything we can imagine. That God created the enormous universe you make reference to, and that God set it in motion in whatever mysterious ways and for whatever mysterious reasons, we cannot begin to understand.
So if I want to look at evidence and science, my conclusion is that scientists and some faithful are both missing the boat. Scientists can't disprove God with a microscope nor should they try, and the faithful can't prove their version of God with analogies involving potholes.
Whatever we are, whatever the universe is, and whatever God is, these things have an undiscovered reality which exists beyond our ability to debate what makes theories work.
Just my thoughts.