It always irks me a bit when science is pushed out of its comfort zone to make some non-scientific point. Subtlety is lost, misconception introduced. And language like "just a theory" suggests that scientific theory is much less rigorous than it actually is.
Exactly. A theory has been vetted by both experimentalists and theorists multiple times until they are all so convinced a hypothesis works that it moves into theory land. In the vernacular, a theory is just an idea, which isn't the way its used in science.
