Critics are criticized for relying on what "anti-mormons" say without verifying these things, and yet when they make the effort to actually CONTACT either experts or the individuals involved, they are still criticized.
This might shed some light on the subject:
"I studied biology at Cambridge under ___ and ___ where I received a Ph.d and let me tell you it is entirely plausible that Godzilla exists and that the same reasoning I use everyday in my career where I publish in peer-reviewed journals, the tools I learned under the tutelage of ___ and ___ as well as from deeply studying books written by ___ and ___, lead me to believe Godzilla does in fact live today and blasts fire from his nostrils. In fact, I had a conversation with ___ one day after a conference and brought up Godzilla. We discussed his forthcoming book on herpetology which is sure to be a widely distributed text. My impression was that ___ disagrees with my conclusions but could see the significance of the points I made and would have a difficult time denying the links, further, the credibility his forthcoming book will bolster the Godzilla hypothesis with will surely roast, no pun intended, the feeble arguments made by critics. The critics are really in a mess, the evidence for Godzilla and even his nephew, Godzookie, is mounting. We don't say it's conclusive, we aren't arguing for absolutes like our fundamentalist critics are, but our position deserves careful consideration and sadly, most of the critics are not themselves herpetologists and unqualified to weigh in on the Godzilla debate. What courses have they taken? What peer-reviewed journals have they published in? These guys are a joke but never short of amusing for us. We just love to log in to the message boards and trip them up on herpetology trivia that most of them have no hope of answering. And they call us stupid, oh, the irony!
Oh sure, there are one or two academics who have thrown their hat in. ___ did so in a statement a few years back as well as ___. But ___'s field is too narrow and doesn't really cover all the relevant material. And we Zillologists have a growing body of literature that spans hundreds of books and articles and the problem with ___ and ___ both is that while they have the credentials, they quite frankly don't have the background in Zillology to be relevant. So until one of these critics can show their stuff and get some real academic training behind them in the relevant fields or the scholarly community in general familiarize themselves with the wealth of Zillology publications available, we pretty much stand undefeated.
And finally out of interest, sigh, you critics might want to know that international hack, ___, the author of "The smoky works of Zookie" that you all laugh at just recently published an article in Nature on the chemical composition of reptile eggs and the evolutionary significance thereof, oh, the laughing stock of the academy he is!"
I think we can answer pretty easily some questions like:
Why apologists emphasize credentials so heavily
Why critics feel the need to contact the sources of the credentials
Why apologists don't like it when critics contact the sources of the credentials.