When I was a teenager, I was very involved in electronics, something that has stuck with me. My first real efforts at understanding science came in working with electricity. One day I was discussing the theory of electricity, and specifically how it “moves” through a circuit with my father, also an electronics hobbyist. We had gone through electrons moving from one atom to the next, and the reasons why some things are better conductors than others, and why some things are so bad as conductors that they are insulators. This all applied to some circuit or another I wanted to build.
Then my father dropped a bombshell. “You know this is all a theory,” he said.
“What do you mean by theory?” I asked. To me at that point a theory was something not so well established. There were facts and then there were theories. Facts were good, theories were not so good.
“Well,” he continued, “we don’t actually observe subatomic particles in motion. We don’t know that an atom looks like those drawings you have.”
“So we don’t really know any of this? What good is it then?” Of course I well knew that I could build circuits based on it, but teenagers aren’t required to be logical with a parent.
“The theory does what it’s supposed to. It explains what we observe. It works. That’s all it has to do.”
“Oh.”
But somewhere deep inside I was upset. I liked my little pictures of atoms. I wanted to believe that they were just that way, and that if I could get a good enough microscope, I could actually observe those little electrons doing their thing. Now electricity is based on very good theory, and it does work. My dad was himself a young earth creationist, though we never discussed that much. I suspect now that he was more along the Kurt Wise type–there may be substantial evidence for evolution, but the Bible says otherwise, so we must believe–only he never felt the need to work on a real theory.