Karl Giberson in a post at BioLogos about laypeople presuming themselves wiser than they really are.
Professor Everyman would have us believe that the “scientific orthodoxy” or “consensus” is just an opinion poll. Scientists all believe the earth is billions of years old; they all like pepperoni pizza; and they all think blue is a great color. We can be lemmings and go along with the crowd or we can think for ourselves, and order sausage pizza, prefer green, and believe the earth is 10,000 years old. … To go along with the majority in this case is caricatured as abandoning your own thinking in favor of blindly accepting someone else’s.
We hear calls to present both Intelligent Design and evolution to high school students and let them make up their own minds. Is this really a serious proposal? How can this possibly work? Questions that leading scientists with Ph.D.s have explored and debated for decades are to be presented to 17-year-old high school students to adjudicate during a 50 minute class right after lunch?
In Dr. Giberson’s usage it seems that “scientific consensus” is when there is a convergence of several separate lines of evidence all supporting the same conclusion, such as the age of the Earth. If astronomers, geologists, and physicists use different methods to arrive at similar conclusions about that age, then this is a consensus among scientific disciplines that gives weight to their agreed-upon conclusion. Scientific Consensus should not be about the preferences of the scientists involved. “My colleagues and I prefer to view the Earth as 4.5 billion years old, and are disinclined to the number 10,000, and so we’ve agreed to use the larger number. That makes it a consensus.”