is the idea that scientists would “look bad” if a science-based, fact-based theory somehow replaced
I didn’t say ‘scientists’ I said ‘evolutionists.’ Too many evolutionists are ideologues will indeed look like idiots if there is a paradigm shift because they have refused to acknowledge any of the accruing anomalies.
The current argument is not about one physical theory that explains evolution versus another. It is about a suggestion that somehow an Intelligent Designer or Creator has been and is part of the process.
Science debates, frequently passionately, the meaning of the physical facts presented. It never suggests things that are not part of the material Universe as explanations.