There is a tendency for apologists and evangelists in general, and young earthists in particular, to view the scientific literature as if they were on some sort of “ammunition gathering exercise.” I say “ammunition gathering exercise” here because that was the exact phrase that used to go through my mind when I was at university cycling to lectures in the formation of stars and galaxies course that I took in my final year for the purpose.
The problem with this approach is that it gets you so focused on looking for sound bites and gotchas that you can all too easily lose sight of important details, context, and other factors that experts in the subject are also taking into consideration that cast a completely different light on the subject. It also leads to you blowing things completely out of all proportion, and attaching a significance to the uncertainties and discrepancies in the data that is nowhere near to being justified. This is what appears to be happening in the original post at the start of this thread.
In my case, the one thing I latched onto was one of our lecturers who described cosmology as a discipline where “27\pi^4 is of order 1.” I took this as an admission that cosmologists didn’t care for accurate measurement. It was only several years later that I realised that he hadn’t been talking about accuracy, but about scale. In cosmology, the distances and timescales are so humungous that in some contexts, the ratio between 27\pi^4 and 1 pales into insignificance. There’s no fudging or dishonesty involved in it whatsoever.
When I got into the exam room at the end of the course, I found that I couldn’t remember a thing I’d been taught. My mind went totally blank and I spent most of the next three hours in near total confusion. I ended up getting only 29% on that paper—the lowest score I’ve ever had on any exam paper, anywhere. It was a painful lesson that if you approach your science degree as if you were on some sort of ammunition gathering exercise, you will just end up making a complete mess of things.
The most effective way to rid someone of this irresponsible approach to science is to put them in a science-based job of some nature or another. One where they have to take what they learned at university and put it into practice in situations where they are held responsible for the outcome. You may have to keep them on a minimum wage and micromanage them for a while until they come to their senses, but it’s very difficult to continue viewing science as something “secular” that is not to be trusted once you’ve had to face the consequences of not taking it seriously.