Perhaps you need to start with the understanding of what intelligence is. The purpose of intelligence is quite simply to choose the best guess regarding some future observation. That’s what it is (even when it concerns itself with the question of what was in the past, because the reason we ask what was in the past is in order to form a better idea regarding what will happen in the future so that we can prepare ourselves in advance.) The purpose of intelligence isn’t a vague “in order to understand how the universe operates”. The universe DOES NOT operate. To say that the universe OPERATES is to impose a strict form on sensory information. It is to say that sensory information can only take CERTAIN form and that to take any other form is IMPOSSIBLE. In other words, it is to FILTER THROUGH sensory information. It is to make reality boring, repetitive, formulaic . . . which is why every creative person despises determinism. There is much more variety to reality than simple causal chain of events. In other words, sensory information can take any form whatsoever. That sensory information presents itself in a single form consistently through time does not mean that it will present itself like that for all eternity.
So yes, the purpose of intelligence is to predict, not to discover how “the universe” operates. It builds formulas or models which are basically generators of predictions. And it builds them, if it truly is intelligence, by generalizing from sensory information. Formula, in fact, is nothing but a compressed form of sensory information. And different sensory information compresses differently i.e. different formulas/models for different sensory information. Some formulas/models involve the strict concept of causality, some don’t. And these formulas/models, I have to repeat, once again, do not describe how the universe works. The universe DOES NOT operate according to the rules of our formulas/models. Formulas/models merely describe the compressed version of our individual (personal) sensory information (that is if they are grounded in sensory information and not merely in our imagination.)
In short, the universe does not operate according to a set of rules (a Divine Plan of some sort.) The universe does not determine events. There is no mechanism that calculates what event will follow what other event. Rather, it is our brains that determine our guesses regarding what’s going to take place in the future.
I didn’t say there aren’t causal relations (or at the very least correlations.) I said that just because some events have causes does not mean that all events have causes. I have also stated that many scientific fields do not think in terms of causes. The more advanced a scientific field, the less it concerns itself with the strict concept of causality.
I think that you’re incapable of differentiating between formulas/models and sensory information.