"That 's a classical example of circular reasoning ."
"Yes . It is also a classic example of a creationist straw man . It demonstrates that you have n't bothered to learn the most basic ideas of the topic and that you are willing to let some creationist hack dupe you . The methods of dating fossils was first developed by creationists when they discovered that certain suites of fossils were always found in the same order in geological strata . They reasoned that the deeper the fossils were , the older they were . Thus , they assigned relative ages to certain types of strata . Of course , their estimates of actual age were way off , since they thought that the earth was only a few million years old . We now have several methods of radiometric dating and can more accurately determine the ages of fossils . The relative dating methods of the creationist scientists has been confirmed - the dates are just older than they thought ."
"That 's a classical example of circular reasoning ."
"Yes . It is also a classic example of a creationist straw man"