So when people of equal intellect are presented the same evidence will they all always arrive at the same consensus?
Take city counsel members or supreme court judges as an example...even though they all are presented the same evidence do they all conclude or judge the case in the same manner? Should the dissenting voices be labeled and categorized as foolish for perceiving or interpreting evidence differently?
This is why the courts are notoriously terrible at deciding questions of science, and they should not be decided there. That is why cigarette companies were successfully for many years denying the link between cigarettes and cancer, heart disease, etc. Courts are adversarial - each side puts an "expert" on the stand. All you need to do is find one person with academic credential who is willing to say what you want said, and that is considered evidence. Science is not adversarial, but collaborative. A study comes out suggesting a link between smoking and cancer, epidemiologists look at the incidence rates between exposed and unexposed population, physicians look at it from a clinical standpoint, biologists look for the plausible biological process, and through peer review, the wheat is separated from the chaff. The cigarette companies kept winning in court, but everyone knew the truth.
The same process was gone through for the link between vaccines and autism. This time, no correlation between exposure and disease were found, no biological process by which it could happen has been identified. Even without the evidence of fraud, its a scientific slam dunk.
The scientific method is a wonderful thing. It admits uncertainty, and therefore demands repeatability, and evaluation by those who understand the science and the mathematical rules of probability. Mistakes are made, and then corrected. Unfortunately, too many people fail to understand how science works. This is further exacerbated by the media which wrongly believes that their job is to be stenographers, repeating every claim with equal credulity.
If I say the Earth is flat, I can easily argue that I've see supports that. Wherever I've been, it has looked flat to me. People have claimed otherwise, and shown photographs that depict the Earth as a sphere, but those could be faked. They claim that the way radio waves works proves it, but I don't believe that. What I have experienced, and what most people have experienced firsthand is a flat Earth. I have seen the evidence, and that is my opinion after reviewing it. That is an opinion. And it is wrong. Opinions, if not supported by the facts, can be wrong. That doesn't mean you don't have a right to them. You have an absolute right to be wrong, and if it makes you happy to be wrong, that's fine too. I wish you well. When your wrongness results in the resurgence of deadly diseases with major consequences for the public health, then we have a problem. Then I have a moral obligation to broadcast as loudly as I can how dangerously wrong you are.