Jeff, You're soooo cuddly sometimes.
Of course the keywords for religion is 'faith' or 'belief'- that throws logic, common sense, respect for structured argument to the wind to begin with, doesn't it?
Of course not. Jeff, your Science god would never require faith of you? Or, would he?
For example, in a 1979 interview with *Dr. Donald Fisher, the state paleontologist for New York, Luther Sunderland, asked him: [Fossils Date the Rocks]"How do you date fossils?" His reply: "By the Cambrian rocks in which they were found." Sunderland then asked him if this were not circular reasoning, and *Fisher replied, "Of course, how else are you going to do it?" (Bible Science Newsletter, December 1986, p. 6.)
[Rocks Date the Fossils] "The rocks do date the fossils, [Fossils Date the Rocks] but the fossils date the rocks more accurately. Stratigraphy cannot avoid this kind of reasoning . . because circularity is inherent in the derivation of time scales."—*J.E. O'Rourke, "Pragmatism vs. Materialism in Stratigraphy," American Journal of science, January 1976.
[Rocks Date the Fossils] "Trilobites of many kinds are common in Paleozoic rocks. About half the fossils of the Paleozoic are trilobites. But trilobites aren't found in rocks younger than the Permian period".- University of Hawaii website
[Fossils Date theRocks] The succession of organism as has been determined by a study of theory remains buried in the rocks, and the relative ages of the rocks are determined by the remains of organisms that they contain."—*R.H. Rastall, article "Geology," Encyclopedia Britannica, Vol. 10 (14th ed.; 1956), p. 168.
Stratigraphy is the oldest of the relative dating methods that archaeologists use to date things. Stratigraphy is based on the law of superposition—like a layer cake, the lowest layers must have been formed first. - archeology.com [Rocks Date the Fossils]
[Fossils Date the Rocks] "The paleontologist's wheel of authority turned full circle when he put this process into reverse and used his fossils to determine tops and bottoms for himself. In the course of time he came to rule upon stratigraphic order, and gaps within it, on a worldwide basis."—*F.K. North, "the Geological Time Scale," in Royal Society of Canada Special Publication, 8:5 (1964).
How do we know this picture represents millions of years Jeff?