Yes, fate vs chance is a false dichotomy because neither allow for true contingency (which is I think what you're saying JF).

Personally I like to look empirically at the world and work backwards—is there telos in the universe? Yes, everything living has intent and direction. Some might say that this intent goes against the current of entropy, of fate (that's another conversation, I see entropy as possibility not disorder). The earth regulates itself to propagate life, it has a telos. The fine tuning constants of the fundamental equations of physics shows the same telos. Evolution moves a species towards adaptation to an engironment. It's the same story at every level you look. And if you consider yourself to be part of that picture then we know the experience of telos from the inside. It involves the freedom to move towards something, something that can sustain us.

If the laws of physics are based on essentially a random number generator (the Copenhagen interpretation) then what about the laws of physics themselves? Are they random? No theyre not! They don't randomly change. They stay constant, within our frame of reference as temporal beings, but they more than likely evolve (cf, fine tuning). That's why I don't believe in either chance or fate.

Even the clockwork universe metaphor rests on a telos: the clock is a piece of technology designed by a human for a purpose.