Formal argument is unfathomable here, but if doesent mean it has to be completely eliminated.
The age old argument about the ‘thingness’ of a thing, (failing all else)
has 3 points of essential ideas criss crossing each other, for most is the cogito ergo sum.
Its placed in the middle between the Idea of the Platonic essential Idea of what the relationship is between universal and particular ‘things’ and the post modern subacription to things consisting of energy particles.
Descartes needs to fix existence in absolute terms, and his cure consists of thought-mind as the guarantor of being. For I’d that dis not exist, even the mind would be lost in a myriad of only possibilities. There for , in order for anything to exist, there needs to be a thought, which is a thought of some ‘thing’.
The mind goes about classifying them, in order of a achema. This schema is then what is defined as teleological.
This is why Descarte at once is the fulcrum upon which both are balanced , as a mode of unifocation of both the the root and the outgrowth of meaning
That science was too quick to dismiss Decartes, is obvious and it took Leibnitz to try to quantify wjat has been just previously a Kantian categorical bypass.
The historical revisions spinned off jumped existentially leaving behind the carefully schematized prior state of Being, and intentionality was borne out of essentialism, to form support.
That its still ongoing is again borne out of the utility found in older states of reasoning as they can be adapted to current situations.
To put forward a hypothetical that ‘all casualty is teleological’ is to reduce primal logic into the nothingness from which it has evolved , doubling down into being , as nothingness.
That this existence as nothingness is interpreted as giving rise to the need for causality as an absolute, bears witness to Sartre’s need to input the cogito into sum -a necessary given.
This may be not a necessary feedback from the view of teleology from Your point of view, and contingency may be used to place the onus of the argument sans the substantial historical analysis You are using, but it is essential to tie them together, as Kant tried.
So in fact, there may not be an exit, and we are stuck instead of the cogito argument into the esse est percipi.
And please note: this does not serve as an absolute either, only calculates casualty on the Leibnitz paradigm.
It is circular and create a standard linear systems on the level of esse eat percipii.
Anything can be argued, even the the thought of such contraptions being useful, but they can not be done away with, since structurally they have been built into the argument
There for I will be resistant to the thought that lack of utility is prima facea proof of inconsistency with this argument, because it is of absolute necessity that ‘it’ be shown to be what ‘It’ is.
If one does not supply the tools with which the pragmatic can be sewn out of the contemplative transcendent, then formal argument can not stand.