Is there something teleological about the half-life of an isotope?
Integral to Dembski's idea of specified complexity (SC) is the notion that something extrinsic to evolution is the source of the specification in how it develops. He compares SC to the message sent by space aliens in the movie "Contact." In that movie, earthbound scientists determine that radio waves originating in from somewhere in our galaxy are actually a signal being sent by space aliens. The scientists determine that these waves are a signal is the fact that they indicate prime numbers in a way that a random occurrence would not. What is interesting to me is the fact that Dembski relies upon an analogy with a sign rather than a machine. Like a machine, signs are produced by an intelligent being for the sake of something beyond themselves. Machines, if you will, have a meaning. Signs, if you will, produce knowledge. But the meaning/knowledge is in both cases something other than the machine/sign itself. Both signs and machines are purposeful or teleological
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I would think of isotopic composition as more of a quality of a thing than as a thing itself with a purpose.
But that same decay is the source of an interesting philosophical problem that I'm seriously trying to address. To give you a sense of that problem, I will first tell a story: before quantum theory was formulated, some folks said there's no need for God because we live in a deterministic universe, where every physical event is determined entirely by previous physical events. After quantum theory became known some folks (probably the same folks) said there's no need to posit God because, if we look at radioactive decay, we find events that have no cause.
An alternative to these two positions is to say that there are causes that are NOT deterministic. As long as physics takes math as its paradigm of knowledge, then such a proposal will seem ludicrous, for causes, to be intelligible, must exhibit necessity. If an event is not necessitated, then it's uncaused.
The alternative position would be that radioactive decay has some kind of cause, but it's not the type that guarantees that the event will happen here and now.
That description overlaps somewhat with a final cause: it's almost as if atoms were trying to decay and eventually do so.
So, in response to your question, I'm talking about the eventual decay rather than the initial composition. But yes, I am not sure that it makes sense to talk about purposes here. The truth is that, for Aristotle, it might not make sense, when considering non-living things, to talk about the purpose of this or that part. Perhaps he is principally committed to regarding nature as a whole as teleological: parts (such as particles) are telic only in a secondary manner.