Actually your example of creationist species isn’t circular at all, it just has no predictive power. Unless you want to say that God really likes beetles, I suppose.

In the end evolution is random, but exerts some pressure towards fitness in some environments. Some traits are legacy or are just plain random; just because an organism has a trait does not mean it is useful now, or indeed has ever been useful for fitness. The whole package must be reasonably fit for some environment, but that doesn’t mean all the traits improve fitness.