Mutations are more common than you think.
It is minute mutations that lead to better abilities, being favoured over time, that brings about the overall change, in a span of millions of years.
It’s not a “one-in-a-billion” happening as you imagine, but something far more frequent. That is how bacteria are able to overcome antibiotics that used to wipe all of them out, before. For more complex organisms, the mutations accumulate based on how they are favoured, during mating.
“Guiding force” is fine, but when it is explicitly detailed in terms of flashes, magic and smoke, it gets too absurd to even consider as possible reality.
The primary problem with evolution is that it often employs reverse logic.
1) The fossil record shows a trail of extinctions yet few if any missing links are found/proven. Certainly not anywhere near the number of missing links that Darwin himself said would be needed to keep his theory from completely falling apart.
2) Beneficial mutations are far out-numbered by neutral and destructive mutations (1 good mutation for every 250,000 iirc). Once enough destructive mutations accumulate within a population extinction follows quickly.
3) Over 100 natural clocks indicate a young earth and universe, all far below anything approaching even 1 million years (see my links page).
Simply put within observable/factual science only micro-evolution is proven within kinds but devolution and eventual extinction among all life-forms will be the eventual outcome.