Lots of muddled thinking, but some good points and a good start. There are a couple of things in particular that I think are interesting and worth drawing attention to. None of these are religious ideas per se; they are philosophical.
The first is the the idea of telos. Telos in the philosophical sense refers to that toward which something is ordered. It is frequently misunderstood as something identical with conscious intent, but it has nothing to do with such intent per se, only with what may be called the causal structure of a thing. For example, when I say that a heart is ordered toward pumping blood through the circulatory system, I am not speaking of conscious purposes. I am speaking of the way in which the heart is structured and the way it functions and to what end it functions. Indeed, without telos, we could not explain efficient causality. We could not explain why hearts tend to pump blood instead of, say, materializing elephants or playing the Dies Irae of Mozart's requiem. Even biologists who strive to suppress talk of telos inevitably resort to teleological language like "function". Sometimes such terminology is dismissed as only metaphorical, but such dismissals are flippant and do not pass closer examination. After all, if a term is metaphorical, then you have to ask what the metaphor stands for. Deny teleological language and biology ceases to make sense.
The reason teleology has been a difficult thing to digest has largely to do with the mechanistic turn in philosophy that has seeped deeply into ideas about science. Notice how popular debates between atheistic, materialist proponents and theistic, dualist opponents of evolution typically center on the probability of something as complex as life arising without a mind to have caused it. Paley's ghost haunts the discussion. The reason is that both the opponents and proponents of evolution in these debates hold to a mechanistic, Cartesian metaphysics where teleology is conceived of as extrinsically imposed by a divine intellect and now something intrinsic to things in themselves. Of course, the proponent will deny the divine intellect, just as he will deny the immaterial Cartesian mind, but he will not have not escaped the metaphysics altogether. This metaphysics has causes a proliferation of problems in philosophy that admit no solutions.
However, it is a mistake to think that this metaphysics is the old contender. There is a small but vibrant revival of Aristotelean metaphysics under way and with it comes a "revival" of teleology.