1)All organisms are driven towards certain outcomes. Even if driven only towards reproduction.
2)Even an organism "at rest" is actively fighting/"moving" against the direction of entropy.
The core of your issue seems to do with anthropomorphisis not teleology. A lot of people conflate teleology with anthropomorphisis because their first introduction to the idea is through the "watchmaker argument" for a creator.
But... If you're projecting a computational view on biology as many Molecular Biologists now do. You are entertaining a machine that is processing/reasoning about data. Saying that a machine can reason is an anthropomorphic interpretation.
Not all anthropomorphisis is equal. There's a difference between pre-rational anthropomorphisis and isomorphic constructs like entropy, computation, teleological processes, etc...
"As early as the 1980s, researchers started viewing DNA or genomes as the dynamic storage of a language system with precise computable finite states represented as a finite state machine (Searls, 1993). Recent complex systems research has also suggested some far-reaching commonality in the organization of information in problems from biology, computer science, and physics, such as the Bose–Einstein condensate (a special state of matter, Bianconi and A.L. Barabási, 2001)."