jmog;1148564 wrote:The fossil record itself is not a dating technique.
I absolutely DO respect science, but what I can, and DO see is that current science has evolved away from the scientific method. It used to be that a scientist started with a hypothesis/assumption and tested it to see if it was true or not and then published the results.
Far too often now scientists start with that they "know" to be true and taylor the data to "prove" their hypothesis. This happens on all sides, including the "creationist" one, so don't think I am bashing evolutionary scientists here.
If you don't believe this happens, or don't believe then I am sorry but you don't understand how scientific research funding is done in this modern era.
Now, back to the fossil record, it is not in itself a dating method, so I'm not sure what you are getting at.
However, if you are referring to where the fossils are found in the rock layers then I will talk some about that.
Once the PhD Physical Chemists got it through the other scientists thick heads that Carbon 14 dating was crap for anything over 50,000 years old due to the very short (~5000 years) half life of Carbon 14, the scientists starting coming up with other dating methods to stick to their claims.
Now, once you start using the rock layer to date the fossil it gets dicey. For the longest time they really didn't have a good dating technique for the rocks, so their only method was "well we know this type of fossil (say from a dinosaur) must be 70 million years old from evolution, so this rock must be 70 million years old" Then when they did something out of the same layer somewhere else "well, from previous results we know this rock is 70 million years old, so this new fossil must be 70 million years old".
That is the definition of circular reasoning and faults in on itself.
Since then they have come up with some pretty sophisticated rock dating techniques like Uranium-Lead (U-Pb) and Potassium Argon (K-Ar). These ones are pretty interesting discussions and one of my favorites since it is up my alley.
Please let me know if you want to go onto this next subject.
Also, while I most certainly do "poke holes" at the current dating methods, that doesn't mean there is no evidence or whatever for a young earth. I suggest reading some of the technical papers under this link. I'm not sure about all of them (some seam reaching) but others are good.
http://www.answersingenesis.org/get-answers#/topic/young-age-evidence