What about those who treat Evolution as a kind of demiurge? Sometimes we see the term “Mother Nature,” used the same way. It is a kind of neopaganism for many people. Men seem to be naturally religious.
Yes, I think this common way of speaking represents our tendency towards animism, which attributes all events and conditions to the acts of an agent. Galileo even spoke this way: "I want them to see that just as nature has given them eyes with which to see her works, so she has also given them brains capable of penetrating and understanding them." - from a letter to a friend, cited and translated by Stillman Drake.
I've always been a little surprised at that, seeing as how the charge of heresy was so easy to stumble into, but I guess this sort of language did not represent a challenge to any particular Church doctrine.