It's a favorite gripe of mine. People who don't really have too many experts on their side--their basic thesis being that the whole body of modern scholarship on the current topic is just wrong--will reach for support anywhere they can. Thus, they favor obviously inappropriate authorities over the only appropriate ones.
I think one of the curiosities in this thread is that we have not even been able to agree on definitions yet. That's why I started out with some. The entire notion of having experts on one side or another does not speak to knowledge at all. It speaks to belief. That line of reasoning is not dedicated to the discovery of truth but to the bending of others to your will. So many people think that is thought, and they could not be more wrong.