I believe that you are getting confused between applying the same word, e.g. gravity, to both our understand/description of what is going on and to the actual physical phenomenon. Sometimes explicit language is used to differentiate these cases.
Sometimes you might hear "the law of gravitation" or "theory of gravity" or similar to refer to the scientific ideas and mathematical description of the phenomenon.
Sometimes you might hear terms like "the phenomenon of gravity" or "the physical effects of gravity" or similar which call out that the speaker is referring the physical phenomenon. This is how we can refer to the natural phenomenon itself.
I'm sure that there are instances where a bare term, i.e. just "gravity", is used to refer to the phenomenon itself, and there are other instances, involving a different context, where it is used to refer to the conceptual understanding. It is up the the audience to infer exactly what is meant. In mentally reviewing the use of the term "gravity" without qualifiers like "theory of" or "law of" or "equations for", I can't think of an instance where it means anything other than the physical phenomenon. I've always heard Newton's result referred to as "the universal law of gravitation", not just bare "gravity". I see the same pattern in "evolution" (refers to the physical phenomenon) and the "theory of evolution" (refers to the conceptual picture). So I suspect that the default, in the absence of any qualifiers, is that the bare terms tend to (but not necessarily always) refer to the physical phenomenon.