There has to be a first cause, something to start the chain of causes and that is God.
Well that implies that God came about from nothing. Or has somehow always existed (if that is possible). In either of those scenarios, some kind of conscious entity exists without having a cause or purpose.
I am an atheist, so I believe that we most likely came about by chance. But now that we are here, we are able to put our own meaning or purpose on the Universe (sort of like how the Abrahamic God was said to have came about by chance and puts meaning and purpose into the Universe).
However someone who is quite smart pointed something out to me the other day that I thought was kind of interesting. We were discussing the Fermi Paradox, this is the paradox that since there are billions and billions of stars out there, there must be billions of planets that could support life. Many of these planets are much older than Earth (by billions of years). It took life on Earth less than 4 billion years to start exploring space. So why has no other intelligent life (on other much older worlds) come to find us yet? His answer was that maybe they have already found us and they are just watching us to see how we develop....
I thought that was a pretty interesting concept that would solve the paradox quite neatly.