We did not confirm that gravitational lensing is actually happening, because there are alternate explanations available that declare the same.
Meaning, gravitational lensing is one of the options to explain the phenomenon.
The other option involves throwing out spacetime because Einstein does something that is rather peculiar.
Allow me to write that down using a simple analogy in which science is a building with extremely well-established foundations, but where the roof line of the building is not truly finished.
Any scientist trying to lift a roof off the ground to place it on the building is undermined because the roof cannot be craned off the ground. The foundation must remain in place at all times.
In comes Genius Einstein, who did not crane a roof in place, but rather delivered the theoretical roof. It turned out to be a perfect fit. Einstein truly is a genius.
The tiny mistake he made is that he established the final work needed to explain the behavior of matter, but... he points it skyward. He does not link it to matter but to spacetime.
This is what Einstein should have done, and I will use the four motions Earth is involved in to explain that.
* Earth's gravity and Earth's spin
* Solar System's gravity and Earth's revolution
* Milky Way's gravity and Earth dancing along in the circular motion
* Milky Way's fastest speed away from where the material story began and Earth tagging along
Of these four motions, the fourth one is the fastest and it is also the one NOT based on gravity.
This is where Einstein should have attached his GR to matter, but instead he pointed it skyward to spacetime.
Next, scientists started to take Einstein's 'roof theory' and turned it into the 'foundation theory' so now we have an inverted overall theory in which the unimportant mistake Einstein made became a major component in how we incorrectly model the universe. Interestingly, to the objection of Einstein.
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Back to gravitational lensing and the alternate explanation:
When alien photons move close to a star, they are swept sideways by the tremendous barrage of star photons they are passing.
There are three phases involved, so pay attention.
First, the alien photon is like going straight toward the star and it will encounter the photons from that star basically head-on. There is no interaction that changes the path of the alien photon no matter how many star photons it encounters coming in opposite direction.
But then the star photons change direction, not individually but at the collective perspective. The angle of the star photons encountering the single alien photon starts to shift. Where at first the encounter involves a 180 degree angle (or non-angle is a better description), it slowly becomes 179 degree, 178 degrees, etcetera all the way to a full sideway blast of trillions of photons at a 90 degree angle per that single alien photon.
Naturally, that 90 degree angle does not last all that long and the angle quickly moves to an 89 degree angle, etcetera to ultimately leveling off to a 0 degree angle.
The three phases the single alien photon encounters are first from a no angle to an angular stage that will point the photon's movement outwardly.
Second, when next to the star, the alien photon will encounter the strongest push sideways by the avalanche of star photons coming straight at it from that 90 degree angle.
And the third phase is where the alien photon gets tagged by the opposite angle of the onslaught of star photons after it passed the star, all the way until the impacts go back to zero again.
I have run this by photon specialists and there is no actual data undermining it. A number of them considers this possible.
Now, if you look into this matter real closely then the first thing to encounter is folks saying it is not true, that it cannot be true because photon-photon interaction is non-existent. But there are studies where photon-photon interaction has been observed. So, we have an alternate explanation about what you call gravitational lensing and what I call the result of photon-photon interaction.
I'll leave you with my article, Besting Einstein.
In reality, I cannot walk in the shadow of this man, but I do see he made one tiny mistake, and I do see how others ran away with Einstein's GR to the objection of Einstein himself (and his good friend Gödel).
