The universe is mostly empty space and when it's filled, it mostly seem chaotic and wasteful. Life does not seem to abound, except on a thin, fragile sphere on an otherwise dead rock. Elsewhere, we see enormous explosions that are more likely to scour life than encourage it. There are large voids in which matter and energy are so scarce these areas might as well be completely empty.
I find no comparison between universes and VCRs. Every component in a VCR serves a purpose and a great deal of testing has been done to ensure that the thing will not simply explode when you plug it in. Perhaps if we regress to a geocentric model of the universe some comparison might be made. Everything therein was intended for a purpose, and the course of the planets were guided by God's hand itself. That I could compare to a VCR, but I know it's a young humanity's view of the universe. Frankly, it's only a lack of perspective that allows a person to look at the chaos and violence in the universe at large and think it's comparable to a clock in need of a maker.
The misunderstanding is that no one is saying that it happened by accident, full stop. It happened by accident only in the sense that it did not happen by someone's purpose, but this accident is not simply an unbiased random walk. For instance, no one really says that rain flows down by accident. Is it true that there are random influences in the water's path, but in following principles it tends to form patterns even if there is no designer. Some ancients thought that the gods dug out the rivers with the wheels of their chariots; now we know that they happen without any intervention.
In any case, science does not as a whole assert that the universe came about randomly. For all we know, this is a necessary universe and universal quantities could have taken no other values. There are philosophical problems empirical science cannot get beyond, so, even if some scientists go beyond their calling and become philosophers, we shouldn't take them too seriously as scientists.
Science does say that there are recognizable principles which guide the macroscopic effects of random variation, though. Gravity pulls together bits of matter and encourages complexity, slows entropy. Self-replicating structures become more common than structures which don't replicate. Those which have the capacity to replicate better, do. All of this makes sense if we have these principles. If we assume that there was a creator, all the chaos and violence still begs an explanation.