Quote:Do you mean because under a young earth interpretation the light never actually emanated from those distant stars and the text seems to imply that that is their primary purpose?
Most visible stars never have and never will shed any light on the earth (unless the second coming is many billions of years in the future).
Some (perhaps) interesting footnotes: we are in an outer arm of the Milky Way galaxy, which contains about 200 to 400 billion stars. Since the galaxy is about 80,000 light years across, even the light emanated by most of the stars within our own galaxy would not have reached us yet if the earth were 10,000 years old. The nearest galaxies to our own are the satellites of the Milky way, each of which is at least 25,000 light years away. To get an idea of how many galaxies (large collections of stars) there are out there, check out this long-exposure image taken by the Hubble Telescope. It covers an area of sky that is the size of a grain of sand held at arm's length. Finally, here is a collection of some of my favorite space photos (including that image from the Hubble).
