"Some older species fossils can be found on top of newer fossils. This inconsistency in your so-called 'progressionism' proves that creation theory is correct, since it means that all species were created at the same time.

There are also serious problems with radiometric dating of all kinds. Did you know that there are areas of the Rocky Mountains where samples of rock taken from the same area date anywhere from 100 million years old to 1 billion years old? Or that samples from the Mount Saint Helens eruption dated anywhere from 350,000 years old to 3 million years old? This method is obviously a joke!"

This is a typical creationist oversimplification of geology. It's rather disturbing that people would honestly believe that someone who spends years to become a geologist really need learn nothing more than "deeper always = older". In reality geology is much more complex than that.

The Earth's surface is made up of numerous tectonic plates which are in constant movement, as residents of California can attest. Sometimes those plates are crushed together, and if you were to take two plates and shove them together, many things can happen. For example, one plate can "overthrust" the other: a process which would lead to recent rock being pushed under an overthrusting layer of older rock with an obvious transition faultline (I would hope that a reasonable person realizes that trained geologists are capable of locating and identifying faultlines). Another possible outcome is crushing and jumbling of the rock, which would lead to regions where old and new rock is mixed together.

A creationist would no doubt look at this and conclude that therefore, geological dating is meaningless. But nothing could be further from the truth: if we can see that the rocks have been crushed and jumbled together, it doesn't mean that geological dating techniques are useless; it just means that this particular region is a lousy place to get clean samples!

There is nothing about the process of geological dating (or any line of scientific inquiry, for that matter) which implies or requires that you should be able to apply your method regardless of the quality of the sample and worksite. Obviously, a region where two plates are being crushed together (or a volcano, where rock is being melted, blasted into the air, mixed with recent rock, etc) is not the best place to get a clean view of progressionism. But this hardly refutes it; it only means that you should go to a region away from a faultline if you want clean linear samples that show progressionism properly (something that quite frankly calls into the category of "common sense").

With this in mind, would you be surprised to learn that almost all creationist attempts to disprove the validity of geological rock strata dating techniques just happen to involve regions near faultlines and volcanoes?

Fallacy watch:

• Straw-man fallacy (massively oversimplifies geology, to the point of egregious distortions and false predictions).