If you have not read Stories Versus Truth, you may want to read that before reading this.

Distant starlight attacks on God's revealed account of history are all mere fabricated stories based on arbitrary assumptions and rationalizations. http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/nab/does-starlight-prove Of course, distant starlight is just one of the many indicators of a young Earth and a young Universe.

Many people don't even realize that such things as Naturalism, Materialism, and Uniformitarianism are arbitrary assumptions with no basis in fact. They are actually lies. There is little knowledge and much story-telling and hand-waving in all attacks of any kind against the Bible. We can observe the variable rate of time and we don't know if there are limits to the variation. There is the fact that creation was not a "natural" event. God has not revealed how He did it, but He has revealed that He did it. Since God created everything and since it is by Him that all things consist (hold together), He is the reason for the consistency we see. But He can stop the observed movement on the Sun across the sky while still allowing time to pass on the Earth. He can create the stars vast distances from Earth and that starlight is at the Earth already.

Of course, we know very little about light and we cannot measure its one-directional speed.

Additionally, Dr. Russell Humphreys has developed a theory using Einstein's Theory of Relativity and the stretching of the Universe. Humphreys' theory gives a possible explanation that follows what we already know and allows billions of years to pass between the galaxies and the Earth while virtually no time passed on the Earth. This is documented in a book, Starlight and Time. And it has been defended successfully against critics. Dr. John Harnett has taken this work further. You can read more about that here.

Old Universe theories have these unsolved problems with reality:

• Rotating spiral galaxies that cannot last multiple billions of years, yet they are there.
• No new star has ever been observed forming, yet we should see many of these if the old-Universe stories were true.
• The horizon problem has no natural explanation for the old-Universe believers.
• Even secular/Atheist astronomers agree that hot blue stars cannot last billions of years, yet they are there in abundance.
• The disintegrating comets and decaying magnetic fields can't last billions of years.

Again, we come to arbitrary assumptions plus rationalizations on the one hand and God's Revelation on the other hand. The most clear Revelation that God gives is through the Bible. The Bible is God-breathed, both when it was written and whenever it is read, brought to mind, or quoted. Whenever the Bible is read, God speaks. We can acknowledge Him or not. He must personally reveal the Scripture to the innermost mind of every person. God also reveals through His creation. He does this through the things we can observe (empirical science). God speaks to the innermost mind of every person, in the conscience and the heart. That's how we know that the Bible is the Word of God without error. Christ is working with each person who follows Him to purge out the old lies and to replace them with Himself, the Truth. Receiving His Revelation involves a death to self and the self's inner paradigm (fake-reality) and a living to the living Christ. It involves submission to the Holy Spirit and a turning off of the human paradigm (an inner fake reality in the mind that appears to be reality itself to the person who is captivated by it). It involves a denial of all the arbitrary assumptions and rationalizations.

(some caveats about hearing God's Voice)

With the Big Bang Theory in deep trouble since it has been shown to be an unscientific fairytale, the religion of Humanism (also known as Atheism or Secularism) needs a way to explain how everything got here.  The Humanists have been very successful in the political arena, finding ways to take control of the scientific journals, the universities, and other positions of power.  For this reason, Big Bang, an unscientific fairytale, is taught as if it had some validity. Possibly the very last hope has been an attack on a young Universe based on distant starlight. However, distant starlight is a tremendous problem for old Earth stories. Distant starlight is not a problem for a Biblical age of the Earth. Watch these videos and they will give you a great education on these issues. You may need to watch them several times to understand.

On the other hand, even though a plain reading of Scripture seems to indicate a young Earth, we can't even deny the possibility that God could have done something that Scripture doesn't hint at and that has left no scientific evidence. It is possible. It just is not worth the time to think about it.

 Almost all of the indicators of the age of the Earth and the age of the Universe show a very young Earth.

Althought almost all of the indicators of the age of the Earth and the age of the Universe show a very young Earth/Universe, there are some indicators that were, at a time when we knew a lot less, used to indicate a very old Earth--an old Earth/Universe was never a sound conclusion, though.  Because of the bias of those who want the Earth to be very old, they chose those few indicators of an old Earth/Universe.  This video shows how those indicators, that had once seemed to support an old Earth, have now been shown to actually support a very young Earth.  Atheist lawyer Charles Lyell popularized the idea of a very old Earth.  He made statements about his purpose to sway people to stop believing what the Bible said.  While Lyell was not much of a scientist, he was a convincing lawyer and knew how to sway public opinion and also how to present false data as if it had validity.