To be sure, you, PastorKevin73, could publish in a peer reviewed journal if you were to make observations and propose and execute tests to distinguish your ideas from those of others. The difference between a person with an accredited PhD and a person without one is that the person who has the degree has testimony - on the authority of others within the scientific community - that he has undergone a substantial breadth and depth of study and has demonstrated the capacity for original and rigorous thought. This is not to say that someone without a PhD has not done any of these things. But someone who has done these things and come out with a PhD rightfully has credibility in his area of study.
Again, this is not to suggest that he is necessarily right about what he says. In fact, a journal is not going to publish something by Richard Dawkins merely because it is from Richard Dawkins. It has to stand on its own merits. But the fact that he is widely published makes what he says, within the field of evolutionary science, credible.
Thus, when there is a panel of people with PhDs in evolutionary biology saying that evolution doesn't say a particular thing, but says something else, being disputed by a panel of people without PhDs saying that it does say the first thing, the common observer can't help but wonder why one whole panel is missing PhDs in the appropriate fields. Consider, next, that the panel with PhDs consists of the movers-and-shakers of the evolutionary world. Who better ought to know what evolution says and doesn't say? The papers that define the science, itself, are largely written by those very people.
In a simpler sense, consider the difference between someone who has spent his life observing a particular thing in nature and someone who has not. Certainly the second person could totally refute everything the first person has come to think. But this is not a common scenario. We cannot suppose that this is the case with every person who argues against someone with a PhD. As Augustine says, "Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking non-sense on these topics." (Augustine, "The Literal Meaning of Genesis" ch.19)
