I don't even know if there are valid appeals to authority. Certainly, it's good to seek the knowledge of those in the know, but I find it sensible to keep the phrase "appeal to authority" exclusively for use to describe the fallacy.
So we probably have a semantic disagreement.
We can agree to disagree, but for my part, I too held your view for many years, combining the logical fallacy with what some famous philosopher once said, something like that the appeal to authority is the weakest of arguments (this presumed that it was a valid appeal to authority).
But then it dawned on me that because there were three tests for the validity of an appeal to authority, then if all three tests are passed, then that appeal to authority is valid, and I asked myself, are there any areas where the valid appeal to authority, while the weakest of arguments, is still useful?
And my answer was that yes, in cases where the claim being argued only depends upon some widely held view from a particular field, but is not that same view, then valid appeals to authority can be employed profitably during discourse. For instance, if religion is or is not the root of all evil (re: to OP) cannot be supported by any valid appeal to authority, but that religion itself involves belief in abstract ideas, can be established through appealing to all the religions' authorities, and all the world's authorities in the secular field of religious studies, and seeing where the authoritative beliefs overlap, this would constitute, through analysis, a valid appeal to authority to establish what every religion has in common, which I am only positing is something like belief in abstract ideas of some kind.
I pit the valid appeal to authority against whatever it might take to instead demonstrate a proposition is true. I am not an authority in any field (I am not a doctor of any discipline), so it would be difficult to establish through demonstration that propositions from this or that field are true, but it is feasible for me to make a valid appeal to the proper authority in order to establish the truth of such propositions.
And it further implies that wherever there is actually a void of authority, it is in those spaces that my view and arguments are just as weighty as anybody else's. I am fighting a losing battle if I'm trying to argue that an entire field is wrong on some point that they uniformly agree on and teach, but there are lots of gaps in authority, especially in matters of faith, morals, politics, philosophy and theology. And Dawkins, in the OP, ventured into one of these fields when he made his claim about religion and roots of evil.
tldr; it's not important.
