That is an illuminating look into your thought process. True science (and reality) doesn't have 'causes', 'purposes', 'ends', 'goals', etc., people do.
It is easy to see patterns in complex, chaotic, interacting systems and misinterpret those 'patterns' as a 'cause' or a 'goal'. Early man found 'patterns' or 'causes' all around him. He noticed for example that if he killed someone rains often followed, cause and effect, but he didn't understand the linkage so he invented God to provide the means. That is where sacrifices came from culminating with the sacrifice of God himself.
I know it is tough for you, but just try and imagine a complex ecosystem that isn't in anyway planned. It is hard because it is so interconnected and patterns pop out everywhere for us (our memories are based on association and pattern recognition). If you can make the leap of understanding, then you can see that each individual organism in the ecosystem is just doing it's own little thing and by chance it is there.
That is reality. I know it is hard to see sometimes, because we are so good at finding patterns. Correlation is not causation.
If you need to see a pattern, look for belief systems based on causation. Catastrophic Anthropomorphic Global Warming comes to mind (and I bet you thought I was going to pick on a religion didn't you?)
Most bad science is based on 'cause and effect,' be very careful basing anything on 'cause and effect'.
I will add that it is extremely easy to see intelligence or even sentience where it does not exist.
I have done extensive with cell culture work, using cancer cells of many different origins. Each of these cell lines has characteristics, and I get to know those cells the way I get to know the personalities of my cats. For instance: cells of a certain type love to be crowded next to one another, and when they are at the edge of the colony, they can be observed to reach out and attempt to find other cells. They will literally crawl across their Petri dish to find each other. Yet, for all that I describe them in anthropormorphic terms, they have no sentience whatsoever; they are responding purely on the basis of chemical responses to chemical signals.
Because of polarity and the nature of the universe everything IS cause and effect. Bad science results from mismatching cause and effect. For that matter, can there be bad science? In science, making mistakes is progress, as long as you realize, and sooner or later you will, the mistake.
I expect that most of you see my suggestion that we are all our own universe as corny but I see it applying here. The problem may be semantics, a common culprit in disagreements. exDem Mom sees the same phenomena the rest of us see but she ascribes to them different characteristics than we do. We see intelligence and design, an invisible hand, where she sees none. For me, it is hard to see the complexity of the interactions of the universe, both material and emotional, and attribute them to happenstance. We all agree that what is simply is but some of us ascribe value to certain parts of it and others don't.
I prefer the Christian view because it fills other needs for me than just a description of what is and how it came to be. If we care to pursue the scientific view we will usually end up back at the uncaused cause and will have gained nothing. Believers see a Divine Cause and relieve themselves of the mental stupor induced by contemplating Uncaused Cause.
Some disdain philosophy and simply accept what is and work with it from there. It is hard to know whether one's world view comes from knowledge gained or whether the knowledge gained is determined by one's world view. That is why I describe it as our own universes.
We end up as an example of the four blind men, each with access to only a part of an elephant, describing what they feel. To them their individual experiences are reality. To an outside observer it is obvious their knowledge is incomplete. A strictly scientific approach would examine the entire elephant and come up with a complete and detailed description of the animal. A poet would describe the elephant in a way that would place it emotionally in the human experience. Is one superior to the other or do we need both. God doesn't exclude science but scientists often try to exclude God, a fool's errand.
Everything, in my view, comes down to values. Values can't be dismissed outright as unimportant and unscientific because they guide our actions and our thinking. Many of our values, if not most, are instilled in us before we have developed critical thinking skills yet they guide our interests in and choices of fields of study and activity. Values can be and often are changed as we gain knowledge but our inclinations often persist. Our life's direction and progress are dependent upon our values.
God and No-God are each unprovable. We must settle for our opinions which are guided by our values.
No put that in a petri dish and examine it!
Oops, fallacy of begging the question for assuming that reality doesn't have 'causes', 'purposes', 'ends', 'goals', etc.