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hannukah harry, I think the word you're looking for is "phlogiston".
And I think "Gravity is a fact." would be a statement about the observation that masses exert forces on each other. The quantification of that force (E.G. the math of Newton, Kepler, Einstein, et al.) may not be exact, but someone doing their sums wrong will not suddenly make masses repel. Even more abstraction occurs when we start asking why masses attract each other... and that's where gravitational theory finally comes into play.
Theory shows up relatively late in the game... but it's used to make all the other data coherent. Saying "Ah-ha, this is merely a theory!" doesn't change the simple matter that, even if this theory or that theory is not 100% correct... Whatever theory is 100% correct (and keep in mind, even if a theory was 100% correct, it would still be a theory) will be nigh on indistinguishable to the layman from what it replaces.
It's very baby and bathwater. "Evolution can't explain Z. Therefore it's a lie and Creationism is True." Ignoring the fact that evolution explains A through Y... and that whatever modifications that may be made to formulate a theory that explains A through Y and Z will result in a theory that bears more resemblance to the original evolutionary theory than it does to Creationism. This ignoring the fact that "evolution can't explain Z" type statements generally stem from a shortcoming of a creationist's conception of evolution rather than any shortcoming of evolution as it actually is.
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Simple Machines in Higher Dimensions
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