Science is composed of specialists, who know a lot about one thing area of science. However, as they move away from that area of specialty, they become more and more like a layman. The science that results is composed of disjointed steps, that cannot fully see that a mouse trap game was set up. For example, Quarks are important in Physics, and although Chemistry is the next adjacent science, Chemist do not even use this, even if we intuitively sense these are both connected. There is nobody to make a bridge who can see both sides of two specialties.
I think that you will find this to be false in practice. Many people study both, or even multiple, sides. The reason quarks don't arise much in chemistry is that they are in the nucleus and simply don't affect very far away from that (the strong force has a finite reach, limited to a few proton diameters). But muonic atoms have been made and are studied. Their chemistry is different because of their different size.
In terms of the mouse trap game called the universe, the fusion reactions of stars have populated the universe with atoms. The five more common atoms in the universe are hydrogen, helium, oxygen, carbon and nitrogen. While the four most abundant atoms in the human body are hydrogen, oxygen, carbon and nitrogen. This is not a coincidence. Hydrogen gas; H2, water; H2O and carbon monoxide; CO, are the most common molecules in the universe. Water based life was part of the mouse trap game.
The ball bearing of stellar fusion rolls down the ramp, hits the lever, that releases the pendulum that swings to set the stage for life to appear. The game is already set up. However, science is not set up to see it. That would required a more generalist science path for education instead of just specialists.
And many people do, in fact, think about these connections. Not all scientists are specialists in this way.
In fact, I think that you will find many treatments linking various aspects of the interconnectedness of the universe if you look a bit.
Yes, it is no surprise that the basic elements of life are those early in the periodic table because those are also the most common and those that have the type of activity required for forming the complexities of life (even silicon seems not to allow for the complex structures of carbon).
But you can also go further. The rate of expansion in the early Big Bang determined how fast the universe cooled. So, when nucleosynthesis occurred, some of the reactions were stopped before completion. This is what gave the initial concentrations of hydrogen, helium, and lithium in the early universe. The first stars only had those elements to form from. So all the rest of the elements (carbon, oxygen, sulfur, etc) were formed in the interiors of stars, often at the end stages of their cycles. They were then blown into the cosmos via supernova. Even heavier elements formed around neutron stars.
So the Earth simply could not have formed prior to the deaths of these first stars. Life was simply not possible (at least as we know it) before the basic elements were formed. So this gives a reason why we see the universe as old as it is: it has to be in order to form us.
Now, the question is whether the 'mouse trap' formed spontaneously or was created by an intelligence. In this, the trap itself is simply the laws of physics and the basic parameters of the early universe.
Bu then, that gets into what is required to form something as complicated as an intelligence. What laws govern that? The mouse trap goes back farther again.