Is a scientific theory ever “just a theory”?
No. A scientific theory is a coherent body of knowledge in some field, based on some unifying principles, tested and confirmed by huge amounts of evidence to explain observations better than alternative explanations. Thus we have the theory of gravitation, atomic theory, quantum theory, theory of plate tectonics, theory of relativity, etc. Theories must pass many tests to be accepted as valid. The OTHER meaning of theory — a guess, hypothesis, or conjecture that has yet to be tested by experiment — is not what is meant by theory in the scientific sense. Your question pits the two meanings against each other. It’s really about language and semantics — not science. This is what creationists don’t get when they complain that ‘evolution is just a theory’.
