> Show teleology is more than a human construction > to explain the purposes we ourselves invented

Your question itself is enough evidence that humans didn't invent teleology, but merely recognized its existence. You are asking for a reason why. You are asking a teleological question.

Two year old children do the same thing, constantly. They ask why.

It is natural to ask why.

It is very unnatural to deny the naturalness of asking why, or to try to suppress it, as if the desire to understand why didn't exist in all of us.

Indeed, the answer to the "why" question is one of the four causes Aristotle says we must explain to understand what a thing is. We must understand the why behind it. That is the final cause, or the purpose for the thing.

What you cannot answer is this: How can final cause -- purpose or motivating reason for something -- arise out of nothing? Indeed, the intelligent person recognizes that such an idea is non-sense, and rejects it out of hand.

You get purpose, or reason for being, from a priori purpose or reason. I work in order to have money. I want money in order to buy food and shelter. I want food and shelter to continue to survive. And so on.

You never get purpose, or reason for being, from nothing.

You think by asking me to show that teleology is more than a human construction, that you will bolster your evidence for reductive materialism -- especially if I can't provide an answer that meets your satisfaction. But in so doing, you are demonstrating teleology. You have a goal. You are driving towards that goal. And your goal is self-contradictory. Your goal is to establish that teleology is somehow not Real, not inherent in the universe, and not inherent in us. But goal-based action is what teleology is all about. So you are engaging in the very behavior you are seeking to prove doesn't exist, except as a figment of our imagination.

A house divided against itself cannot stand.