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Here is the way I see it. I have studied the fossil record in College. I was very interested in Geology and Archeology and studied the fossil and Geological artifacts at some length. I just have a different perspective.

The universe looks old. Exactly as it would look if it's really old. As if it has one, specific, consistent history. As if it has been expanding for fifteen billion years from a single point. As if light has been traveling through it, lensing through gravitational fields, and as if events hundreds of thousands of light-years away have sent light at right angles to us, hundreds of thousands of years ago, which reflected off other objects and then came toward us. We can use Euclid's geometry to show how far away these objects are and how old their light is.

The Earth looks old. Exactly the way it would look if it's really old. As if it's been around for four-and-a-half billion years, and was hot and molten for the first half-billion of it, as if the continents have been gradually moving for the entire time, and as if the oceans and rivers and streams and tectonic flows have been shaping it, slowly, for all that time. As if Africa and South America have been receding from each other for millions of years, as the deposits have built up on the continents and the sea floor has spread, with the magnetic iron and nickel in the volcanic deposits recording the Earth's changing magnetic field, exactly in time with the changes we have been measuring. It looks just as if radioactive isotopes have been here, changing into their stable daughter elements in accord with the laws of physics, changing the ratios of those daughter isotopes in exact proportion to the elements (not the isotopes) found in the rock, just exactly as if they've been doing so for hundreds of millions, or billions, of years.

Life on Earth looks old, exactly like it would be if it's really old, as if it's been here for almost the entire history of the Earth, as if it's been changing all that time, with new species appearing, each similar to something that was here before. As if coral, dated to three hundred million years ago by the radioactive material in the rocks it was growing on, was showing four hundred days in a year, exactly matching the predicted slowing effect of lunar tides on the Earth's rotation over three hundred million years.

Life on Earth looks as if it's descended from a common ancestor. Exactly like it, just as if it's arranged in a nested hierarchy of similarity, instead of all the infinite other ways it could have been arranged, and as if the junk, noncoding DNA in each animal has exactly the same similarity relationship as the morphological hierarchy, like the errors in DNA, shared in the nested hierarchy, such as why humans and chimps and gorillas can get scurvy but all the other mammals can produce their own vitamin C.

Certainly God could have created the Earth six thousand years ago. Or last week, for that matter. But regardless of when it was created, it was created to look exactly as if it had all this history.

Thanks to a fellow Freeper named whatajoke who articulated this for me while clarifying my position.