The point is, everybody bases what he understands on info he gets from his senses. If light from the stars is running through the lens of the 'ether' in ways that nobody has understood the mechanisms of, we get a skewed view of what and where the stars really are.
Certainly this is the same for our view of things from the distant past. It's far better to listen to the records of people who have been there, than to try to guess that we are guessing correctly with our so-called science.
There are so many experiments which you could perform yourself to see how physics work. It just needs study, something I need to do more often before posting misinformation. Lol.
No lay person performs many of those globe-revealing experiments. If he isn't biased by what he has learned, and stands in Kansas at night, he sees a flat-earth and its dome. He is wrong to think that it is a flat earth, but that might be all that he knows.
Back in the late 1800s, scientists said that science had found out everything that there was to find out. Then in the early 1900s, Einstein came along with some more.
Does anybody think that science has found out about the basic stuff of science? Consider. They still don't know how to make people live more than about 100 years old. Why not 1000? Simply because science is, and will be for a long time, just scratching the surface.
They don't KNOW the age of the universe, or its size. They are simply using a 'consensus of self-propagandizing understanding' when they say that they know. They are simply repeating something similar to the idea of the old 19th century science, that science has found out everything that there is to find out.