I'm aware of the First Cause Argument, and its failings, such as (just for example) its assumption of completely linear time -- and I'm not even going to get into the illogic that is his third argument wherein he asserts -- using faulty reasoning -- that the 'first cause' must be 'eternal' or the utterly unfounded assumption of the fourth argument. However, even if such a 'first cause' existed, that would be at the beginning of the chain of events that led to the existence of life, which means that you could still have 'blind materialistic forces' being responsible for life, so long as those 'blind materialistic forces' were, themselves, part of the chain that began at the 'first cause'.
Tell me if I'm wrong, but your statement seems to say that it's OK to call the forces blind, even though science isn't addressing the question of whether or not the forces had a cause that wasn't blind.
Why is there a need to characterize material forces as blind or otherwise, from a scientific perspective?
I don't see any, and it seems to me that letting such nonscientific statements leak into the discussion is the source of a lot of mischief.