Prior post you stated: “And this does create some problems, because if a single unimpeachable measurement can show that the universe is (say) more than 100,000 years old, biblical inerrantists have to posit that physical processes don’t work now as they have in the past.”
I would simply conclude that we will always have some very inconclusive and controversial science and natural clocks too. But when the natural clocks are all reviewed as an amalgamtion they surely do point back to a time of one beginning, a singularity of Earth and Universe, a big bang if you will ~ an explosion/expansion so unique it added order and beauty to all of creation.
Science has not yet determined how to accurately read all the various and sundry natural clocks. What catastrophic events may affect them profoundly? Has anything truly been observed to proceed only uniformly in this Earth/Universe? If you wish to apply radiometric dating I would ask:
Has science observed any/all decay rates closely enough for all situations (i.e. lightning, tornadoes, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, sunspots, big bang, etc.) to conclude that are always completely uniform?
“Take for example astronomical parallax and the observed speed of light. If the universe is only 10,000 years old, then either (1) the universe was created with galactic expansion already 99+% of the way from the big bang to what we see now, or (2) the speed of light was several orders of magnitude faster in previous millennia than it is presently.”
Interesting that you bring these up as well - I’d have to agree the very early universe does appear to break all known natural laws beginning with the singularity or taken to a further extreme creation ex nihilo [out of nothing]or ‘in the beginning God’. Yet cosmic background radiation levels and the heat signature of the Universe both appear to also support only thousands of years.
Have you seen this creation week math? Positing, if God did set aside all natural laws in a supernatural creation week then the 1st day relative time lapse for the expansion of the universe may have appeared to allow for 7 to 8 billion years, the 2nd 24 hour day relativity appeared as 3.5 to 4 billion years and so on thru the 6th day with a relative appearance of 13.7 to 15.7 billion years.
Also ‘God rests the 7th day’, what does that whopper of a statement truly mean?
In regard to the “Starlight and Time” issue addressed in your posts.
The theory of evolution has a comparable problem for which there is no current credible answer.
This is from an article by Robert Newton:
The big bang model assumes that the universe is many billions of years old. While this timescale is sufficient for light to travel from distant galaxies to earth, it does not provide enough time for light to travel from one side of the visible universe to the other. At the time the light was emitted, supposedly 300,000 years after the big bang, space already had a uniform temperature over a range at least ten times larger than the distance that light could have travelled (called the “horizon”) So, how can these regions look the same, i.e. have the same temperature? How can one side of the visible universe “know” about the other side if there has not been enough time for the information to be exchanged?
The full article can be viewed here:
http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/cm/v25/n4/light-travel-time