There is an area of causal inquiry that allows for logical deduction - culpability. The tracing back from effects to a person or persons who are the cause is often a logical process that forms the basis of legal and historical inquiry. When considering this kind of causality, the degree of responsibility, blame, or praise is determined by a person's degree of freedom and their intentions or negligence. The intention or inattention is the cause. A cause-and-effect relation of persons is necessary when determining responsibility, blame, justice, and, by extension, grace and love. 

The logical (ie. a priori) element in cause and effect has to do with the intention of a person. The fundamental presupposition of legal/historical causality is, of course, the person - the moral agent. A person is the locus of a cause. If we cannot find a human or perhaps animal cause, then we must blame or praise a divine one, ultimately getting back to the Logos, God. Therefore, some destructive event that is completely outside of human responsibility is called an "Act of God." 

Once we are aware of the personification and remove it, we are left with the banal historical fact that "people have used guns to kill people." It's those people who are the problem. Removing intent, the shortcut "guns kill people" has been essentially flattened to "occasionally a death is correlated with an object of the group commonly called 'gun'."

The concern of modern science is to determine cause-and-effect as a relation of things rather than persons. In doing so, it borrowed the paradigm of culpability and so routinely personifies the thing as being causal. Each statement of cause is invoking a thing as a tiny god, and then afterward, denying that the thing is in fact of minuscule divinity. For the theist, this procedure is at most a harmless shortcut, and not even that for Leibniz. By whatever circuitous route, which might include angels, demons, and monads, all order ultimately flows from the Logos, God -- and God is indeed intentional. For the 'secularist', this is an utter embarrassment. David Hume emphatically points his skeptical finger and reluctantly calls out the shortcut - induction is a habit of belief. Without appealing to the intention of the Logos, the whole scientific enterprise is illogical. Philosophically, the effect of this on 'secular' science is brutal. 

One of the most strident atheists in the world is the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. Ironically, one of the things he is best known for is introducing the concept of "selfish genes" to the evolutionary literature. Genes are strands of DNA code that code for a certain protein or trait. DNA is not in and of itself a living thing as far as we know. It has no intent, but in the operation of a cell, a gene provides a recipe that cell mechanisms put to use. Dawkins, of course, knows this, but personifies the gene to efficiently get across his overarching idea of the locus of natural selection. He is so aware of the shortcut that he knows any scientist will deny the intent when seeking to understand the idea; thus, we have science by irony. In Selfish Genes, the ironic intentional shortcut is on neon display. 

If we allow ourselves the license of talking about genes as if they had conscious aims, always reassuring ourselves that we could translate our sloppy language back into respectable terms if we wanted to, we can ask the question, what is a single selfish gene trying to do?

- Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene: p. 88 

Richard Dawkins - The Selfish Gene explained - youtube.com

The literature on evolutionary theory, in particular, is filled with this kind of intent and design language, which brings an even bigger irony and absurdity - we understand the gene by declaring it a person, but the human, the actual person, is a mere vessel or mechanism of the gene. Frankly, Dawkins made even a few 'secular' scientists flinch with how unabashedly this ironic procedure was presented.  

The Two Languages of Science (2020) by Yanai, I., & Lercher, M. - ncbi.nlm.nih.gov 

Dawkins' intentional language is sometimes misrepresented as being merely anthropomorphic. We have every reason to believe that any animal with a central nervous system and senses enough to detect others takes an intentional stance. What is truly anthropomorphic is then denying the intention and replacing it with abstruse language concealing a different kind of intent. Is there any other animal that does this without being deceptive? Is there any other animal that is so deceived? 

That's right, deceived. The verb 'cause' and any approximate synonym is intentional: will, bring about, lead, generate, spawn, create, produce, purpose, incite, instigate, determine, begin, motivate, etc. The most that a denier of intention can say about a 'cause' is that it is a metaphor. Hume's skepticism allows no other option because all that connects an observed cause to an effect is our habits, jumps of extrapolation, and preconceived bias. 

The most that can be said of the abstruse supposedly metaphor-free language used in science is that it might shift the intending cause from the lifeless thing to the Logos or at least some higher-order intermediary of intent, such as perhaps the Wave Function, General Relativity, Nature, or the Universe. This is not necessarily so, as seen in the contrasting Night Science and Day Science that Itai Yanai and Martin Lercher (2020) defend as informal and formal science language: 

On the one hand, Yanai and Lercher have made their point well - Night Science, such as Dawkin's "selfish genes" can be translated into the more precise and testable "Day Science" language of hypotheses. On the other hand, as the bolded causal words show, metaphysically nothing has changed, at least not with these examples. Except for Aristotle invoking "Nature" as a product of the Logos, both night and day statements are invoking tiny gods. Apart from their use in forming hypotheses, the acceptability of causal verbs as Day Science language is a kind of scientific euphemism treadmill that, thankfully, moves more slowly than the Politically Correct version.

The evidence is in. These are all sound statements of knowledge if one can believe in tiny gods or:

• delete the tiny gods by unexamined habit; or

• delete the tiny gods after accepting that causality in science is fundamentally an ironic endeavor; or

• believe in some aggregate relationship of monads in harmony with God; or

• believe in some integration of me spoken by the Sumerian Triad or the Christian Trinity; or

• see this kind of causal language as a shortcut pointing back to the underlying cause of everything - the Logos, God. 

The first three options are objectively ungrounded and unacceptable on their face. With very slight qualifications, the last three options are equivalent and can ground all of the patterns seen in the hard sciences.

So what of Aristotle's totalizing generality, Nature? 

Nature, according to Aristotle, is an inner principle of change and being at rest (Physics 2.1, 192b20–23). This means that when an entity moves or is at rest according to its nature, reference to its nature may serve as an explanation of the event. We have to describe how—to what extent, through what other processes, and due to what agency—the preconditions for the process of change or of being at rest are present, but once we have provided an account of these preconditions, we have given a complete account of the process. The nature of the entity is in and of itself sufficient to induce and to explain the process once the relevant circumstances do not preempt it.

- "Aristotle’s Natural Philosophy" (2023) by Istvan Bodnar - plato.stanford.edu 

Thereby Aristotle reasons four required causes in increasing hierarchy: matter, form, efficient, and ultimate. Matter of a suitable nature can be given a suitable form by efficient causes towards the ultimate intention of an agent. Internally or externally, all four causes in the chain of causation are required for an explanation. Having (inadequately) dispensed with the Logos after rejecting the "Heraclitean doctrine" of the unity of opposites (Physics 1.2) and failing to concede that the Problem of the One and the Many is in fact a real problem, Aristotle had to conceive of the Unmoved Mover to make his Physics work. Needing an ultimate cause for all motion, it must be the Unmoved Mover that Aristotle is intending when talking of Nature in total. 

But maybe not. Aristotle's method is not that of experimental design as used in modern science. It is observation, analogy, and metaphor. He is using what is commonly known to explain the unknowns of Nature. 

Plainly... in the science of Nature, as in other branches of study, our first task will be to try to determine what relates to its principles. 

The natural way of doing this is to start from the things which are more knowable and obvious to us and proceed towards those which are clearer and more knowable by nature; for the same things are not ‘knowable relatively to us’ and ‘knowable’ without qualification. So in the present inquiry we must follow this method and advance from what is more obscure by nature, but clearer to us, towards what is more clear and more knowable by nature. 

Now what is to us plain and obvious at first is rather confused masses, the elements and principles of which become known to us later by analysis. Thus we must advance from generalities to particulars; for it is a whole that is best known to sense-perception, and a generality is a kind of whole, comprehending many things within it, like parts. Much the same thing happens in the relation of the name to the formula. A name, e.g. ‘round’, means vaguely a sort of whole: its definition analyses this into its particular senses. Similarly a child begins by calling all men ‘father’, and all women ‘mother’, but later on distinguishes each of them. 

- Aristotle Physics Book 1.1 

The very nature of using a generality is to treat it as an agent - a god - who has messages - an angel. The generality of all Nature is treated by Aristotle as a hugely influential angel, regardless of whether he conceived of the Unmoved Mover or not. And the angel Nature abhors a vacuum, the meaning of which is absolutely clear - vacuums suck.

Against Tiny Gods

A seven-day creationist reading the Bible, and everything else as literally as they can, will have no problem with the Hard Sciences. Most of those sciences are meant to be read literally. The content presented this way - physical laws, chemical reactions, anatomy, and esoteric mathematics - is entirely compatible with a high view of theism - an omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent God. 

I've known several engineers, physicists, chemists, and mathematicians who have entertained seven-day creationism. I've even known PhD-level university professors who specialize in biology or medicine who have settled on such a view. Of course, given the complete and total integration of Evolutionary Theory into Biology, they are swimming against the current - perhaps kicking against the bricks - and must be selective on when and where they divulge those beliefs. 

Evolutionary theory is routinely and unabashedly written as ironic science. Regardless of whether it is popular or scientific literature, a literal reading of an article or book using Darwinian or Neo-Darwinian theory routinely reads as a perverse form of creationism invoking tiny gods who design biologic function or pick winners and losers. That is, the literal reading offends both moral sensibilities and scientific sensibilities.

That last quote is from An Introduction to Behavioural Ecology, 3rd edition. The authors fully acknowledge (page 3) that the ironic science type of jargon is there for the sake of the reader:

There is no doubt that loose terminology can indicate imprecise thinking and half-formulated ideas. But it is equally easy to conceal woolly arguments behind an obfuscating screen of scientific jargon. We have used a simple direct style in order to make our arguments clear and not because behavioural ecology is woolly subject. 

Krebs and Davies quite ably defends this by quoting George Orwell's satirical translation of Ecclesiastes 9:11: