Just to chime in, because I love a good flamewar (and I do have a PhD) appeal to scientific consensus is still appeal to authority. I don't know how familiar you are with the peer review process Daldoma, but it often ends up with highly . . . well, for lack of a better word, highly inbred ideas. Big Gun Professor X has some theories, his graduate students do work in those areas. Eventually they graduate and do their own research, and they will have similar theories and publish in similar conferences and journals. Worse, they will go into government funding agencies like the NSF and only fund research they think is promising which will usually be somewhat in line with their ideas (newsflash: all great ideas seem dumb to the current community. Of course, so do all dumb ideas).
Scientific consensus is frequently wrong. At one point 'all of the experts' believed that:
* the sun revolved around the earth
* the earth moved through a mysterious aether
* fat makes you fat
* humans are causing global warming
In other words if you want to prove Jesus was a historical figure, you can't just quote the experts. Its not as worthless as Alawen is making it out of course, but in the end you have to cite facts.
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