If that's the entirety of your definition of "formal cause", which implies nothing about their real existence nor anything about their having some sort of ontological responsibility for the existence of a thing. But that's not the case now, is it? That's not exactly what Aristotle and his successors meant by a "formal cause".
What they meant by formal cause is what makes something the kind of thing that it is - its nature, essence, or pattern. That should not be taken to mean the form has some sort of existence outside of the thing, as in Plato's Forms. Forms exist in the things that instantiate them and, considered as abstractions, in intellects. If there is no thing that instantiates it and no intellect that possesses it, the form does not exist.
Not if "generates" here doesn't imply whatever you intend by "efficient cause", and I think you're entirely aware of how a Humean-style analysis will look at the process of protein synthesis to deconstruct your assertion.
An efficient cause is a prior condition that leads to the existence of something or a change in it, and "generates" definitely implies that.
So your notion of "final cause" doesn't include purposefulness or even "causal power"? It's nothing but the ceteris paribus outcome of a mechanism?
You could talk about those things when talking about final causality, but the bare, core notion of a final cause is just that every agent acts for an end. In other words, everything that acts tends toward some particular effect. In that sense it is the flip side of efficient causality. Efficient causes are the prior conditions, entities, etc., and final causes are the future conditions, entities, etc. So if A is the efficient cause of B, generating B is the final cause of A. And more than that, A causes B
because generating B is the final cause of A. It is the explanation for why each particular A brings about B as opposed to one of them bringing about C, one of them bringing about D, etc.
