I think the quest for causality is hard-wired in us.
I’ve thought about this for many years, how our species tracked the seasons, learned to predict growing and harvesting times and the movements of animals, recorded observations of all kinds and built theories around them, invented mythical and magical explanations for things, and, still not satisfied, found our way to scientific thinking.
We naturally and automatically observe patterns in our babies’ behavior, our pets’ behavior, and our cars’ behavior, form hypotheses, predict things, and have responses ready for a variety of actions according to our theories of causality and our interpretations of meaning. It’s just the way we’re built, how we function. It must have been a survival skill from the beginning; apparently it still is. No doubt those who did not have it did not survive.
And so naturally life itself would come under the same scrutiny that we have applied to everything else. What more enticing challenge for our most subtle and spacious minds?
But the fact that we have a drive to look for something does not mean it is there to be found, any more than the search for extraterrestrial life in the universe—the search itself—proves that such life exists.