It is very simple. You just have to trust persons who are experts in their fields, such as those at the astronomical observatories to give you the answers. You just have to trust your instructors. If you don't know little or anything about anything you have to do some study to learn about it. Most engineers and scientists started out in first grade, too, like anyone else. They just continued on studying and learning farther than other persons.
There you go, trust authority, trust your teachers, professors, doctors, government, the pope, the media, Coca Cola, McDonald's, Walmart, Hitler, Stalin and Mao.
I'll trust them enough to listen to what they're saying, but that's it, if I have questions, I'll ask them, and if I spot what I think are holes in what they're saying, I'll call them out.
I'm not going to trust their claims without something I can empirically verify.
Most teachers don't verify anything they've been taught, so they actually don't know anything.
Engineers can often use what they've been taught, so I take little issue with that.
That's actually probably the best form of verification, being able to use something.
If you can use it than they must be right about something, althou they may not be verifying everything they're teaching.
The trouble is no one, except for NASA and some other government space agencies can supposedly use 'factoids' like the sun is 149.6 (I love how specific they are about something they've never been to, and can never go to. Not 150 million kilometers, 149.6, how do you like that? Next year they'll say it's actually 149.8, and a few decades from now they'll say it's actually 188.295. Derrr, can we all just agree it's really, fragging far??? But that's just it, maybe it's much, much closer...or further than they think or say they know.) million kilometers away, so you can't verify it that way, by using it to do something the way an engineer does, so how can you verify it?
Maybe this discussion might best be considered closed
But if or if not, a few thoughts.
How many courses have you taken where you have classroom hours on theory and then more class room hours following in lab proving and verifying the theories ?
Getting back to the subject, are you saying you wouldn't trust anyone at an observatory ?
How much do you know about how they measured those distances ?
No, I would trust them very little.
I would listen to their claims, and use the observatory and whatever other means I had at my disposal to verify those claims.
Of course I couldn't verify every claim astronomers have ever made, but I'd at least attempt to verify the basics, like how far the moon is from the earth, how far the moon is from the sun and so on, and if I couldn't verify them to my satisfaction, I wouldn't believe them and I'd make why I don't believe them known to the public via social media.
However if they checked out, I'd be more trusting of mainstream astronomy and science in general in the future, but not absolutely so.
You see theirs degrees of trust, you're selling a false dichotomy, where either we accept everything mainstream science has to say all the time, in spite of whatever our experience, reason (not only our individual experience and reason, but the collective experience and reason of our society as a whole aka common sense), alternative research and intuition is telling us, in spite of the fact that so few people ever have a chance to verify some of their claims, in spite of how much money and politics are being thrown at some of their claims, in spite of how complicated, convoluted and far fetched some of their claims can be, how assumption, culture, language bound and riddled their interpretations of that data can be, or...throw the baby out with the bathwater sort of speak, stick our fingers in our ears and go crawl under a rock somewhere, never to pick up another book or use another piece of technology again.
There's a difference between faith and trust for me, the way I define them.
I have faith in almost nothing, I have trust in some things, but my trust must be earned, authority of itself is insufficient.
In spite of the fact they've been caught by others and themselves knowingly and unknowingly exaggerating their claims thousands of times, like how they used to tell us sugar and tobacco were harmless, even good for us.