On Quoting The Consensus In Order to Support the Consensus

David Pallmann is a young interesting evangelical Christian apologist who is willing to question beliefs based merely on the consensus of scholars. Given that on Facebook he shared a picture of the three big conservative apologists, Gary Habermas, Michael Licona, and William Lane Craig [on the left], I take it he's aiming for them:

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"In any field of research, but especially in biblical studies, be very careful about uncritically accepting something as true just because it is widely assumed to be true within that discipline. Unjustified ideas can become cemented within scholarship and then reinforced by peer pressure within subsequent generations of scholars. What I've found is that many of the individuals within various fields accept the consensus uncritically. When called upon to defend the consensus, they will often just refer back to the consensus to support the consensus. Either that, or they will list some stock arguments for the conclusions of the consensus. But when asked to defend those arguments against criticisms, it often becomes clear that they are incapable of doing so.

This is one of the main reasons why I dislike the modern fad, with which so many Christian apologists are infatuated, where one stresses that their arguments for, say, the resurrection of Jesus, are based upon scholarly consensus. The assumption seems to be that if the arguments are based upon scholarly consensus, then there must be good evidence for the premises. But that's simply a bad assumption. Scholarly consensus is frequency based upon the flimsiest and most vapid reasoning I've ever seen. What's more, scholarly consensus is generally not terribly friendly to Christianity. For this reason (and many more) Christian apologists would do better to challenge the scholarly consensus, when appropriate, rather than constantly cozying up to it."

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I couldn't have said it better. Now let's see some consistency. The whole history of Christianity is basically quoting from one theologian to another, to another, based on theological consensus.