There are always controversies in science, some that wage for decades. These end up being settled one way or another, or in a novel way, not because public opinion is swayed or success is perceived, and so forth, but because new scientific evidence emerges that allows the rejection of one hypothesis over another. That's a bit simplistic, of course.
The arrival at a firm theory in science occurs piecemeal. There is no prior agreement as to how data should be collected and what criteria will be used to reject hypotheses except on the level of individual experiments. This is especially true of something that has been investigated for hundreds of years. The final result is a conglomeration of historical and widely divergent human input and is not dependent on the initial conception of a single individual (who might be wrong)or political movement. We learn from error. And actual experiments are really quite independent of global theoretical assumptions.
And, even if it's true that we don't have an absolute, internal, objective standard by which to measure truth in science, we come (with the help of statistical methods) very close.
The current controversy in the form of ID does not employ any rigid scientific method for hypothesis testing. As such it drops the science altogether and is left as a political-religious-social-historical movement.
to the fact itself.
But this ought to be a question of scope, as I indicated in reply #10 to the idea that scientific knowledge must limited to the natural world: scientific knowledge must be based on evidence, be predictive, logical, subject to modification and limited to the natural world. The question of scope suggests these problems: does the concept of universe exceed the limit of the natural world? Is the assumption of universe not warranted by the concept the natural world? Or, moving from space to time, is the dilineation of fields of inquiry justified over time? Are no limits to time?
The dilineation of scope is the most problematic issue here, so problematic that it will result in politics, IDist or no IDist.