Scientists have directly measured the gravity coming from big balls of lead. The gravity didn't make the scientist put the lead there, and the gravity wasn't there before the lead. The lead must have made the gravity.

If you want to take a very large-scale - if poetic - view of things, you could also (very arguably) say something like "Mass is Fate".

Mass represents a zone where probabilities want to be. The more that aggregate, the more they make other things want to glom on. With a high enough density, nothing that's nearby can glom to literally anywhere else, and there's your black hole. The Great Inevitable. In this space, there are no other possibilities. Very Demiurge-y.

Dark matter is mysterious enough to be compatible with both at the same time, I think.

(Is a collisionless gas really even an "object"?)

I mean, it's kind of both: objects have gravity, which attract them together, which creates more gravity and larger objects. Stars are what happens when the rest of physics disagrees with this (and black holes are when gravity wins anyway).