But all this verbiage is still just a way of explaining things, which is really just to say, a way of predicting things.

And that's all it really means for something to have "purpose": to be a necessary rhetorical component of an explanatory or predictive narrative.

For example, a wheel of a bike is a part of a useful predictive model on a bike's likelihood of moving through space. Therefore, we say the wheel has a "purpose".

But it's all just a game of prediction and rhetoric. And as it's all stemming from our minds, it goes without saying that we think of it in analogues to our own teleological (i.e. predictive) phenomena of desire and will.