There is NO SUCH stupid thing as "the weight of scientific evidence". There is also no such thing as "scientific consensus"!
That's not to say that people don't use such terms but simply that they are contradictions. The real scientific method is about proof not some sort of consensus of opinion building. The real scientific method does not function like a civil court where some group of people vote on a verdict based on the preponderance of the evidence. The actual scientific method has to do with the dispassionate application of logic to answer a specific question. That question being, "Is hypothesis XYZ true or is it false?" The answer is never a matter of opinion - ever. As such, "scientific opinion" is an oxymoron and any such opinion that is offered is merely that, an opinion. You can base an opinion on scientific data but that doesn't make your opinion science and if you try to force it to be so, as virtually all of modern science has done, then you undermine science and turn it into opinion and as a result you undermine the very idea of truth itself and build a society where people grow up believing that any fact of reality is just someone's opinion and the result is a society without any absolutes and therefore no morals and therefore no civility and therefore no freedom, which is precisely the road your so called science has had us on for that past century or more.
Clete
