Energy is an accounting system for tracking motion over time, to ensure past/future motion lines up. So by imposing dTotalEnergy/dt = 0, you do indeed get the

Energy is an accounting system for tracking motion over time, to ensure past/future motion lines up. So by imposing dTotalEnergy/dt = 0, you do indeed get the apparent teleological conspiracy of nature, to ensure that the end 'can be no greater than the beginning'. Perhaps the rehabilitation of these ancient greek causal maxims lies in seeing them as attempts to phrase principles of conservation. Since Aristotle would have only thought that these principles apply to the essential basic constitutive properties of nature, later found to be mass/charge/etc., these do succeed.