School News
Pr. Hamidan Attends the Latest GRI Field Conference
In the background are skeletal remains of dinosaurs left embedded in the rocks.
Pastor Hamidan with the Goosenecks of the San Juan River in the background.
The Geoscience Research Institute, funded by the General Conference, and operating from Loma Linda University, conducted a field school for educators during July 11-23, 2004. Twenty-four educators from around the US and the world attended, including Pastor Trenton Hamidan, from Greater New York Academy. The students of this field school attended a total of 26 lectures presented by a geologist, a geophysicist, a paleontologist, a molecular geneticist and a biologist. This was in addition to the bus and on site lectures. They all addressed issues on creationism and catastrophe (mainly the worldwide flood).
Pastor Hamidan points to dinosaur tracks located in East Central Utah.
The bus tour covered over two thousand, two hundred miles from Arizona, through Utah to Wyoming and back to Flagstaff, Arizona. We visited the meteorite crater and the Grand Canyon in Arizona. We observed the unconformable contact between the Cambrian Muav Limestone and the overlying Mississippian Redwall. In the standard geological explanation, this represents a missing time gap of over one hundred million years. There is no satisfactory scientific explanation for this. A universal flood theory in which there was massive upheaval and rapid deposition of land masses, offers a more plausible explanation.
Other highlights of the tour included visiting Monument Valley, the Goosenecks of the San Juan River, The Arches National Monument, Canyon Lands National Park and Dead Horse Point which in my opinion rivals the Grand Canyon in beauty.
Pr. Hamidan Points to the fossilized femur of a T-Rex.
The Dinosaur National Monument near Vernal, Utah was astounding and the dinosaur track sights were sobering. Upheaval Dome was a beauty beyond description.
My most memorable experience was mining fish fossils in the Ulrich's fossil quarry near Fossil Buttle National Monument, Wyoming. It was humbling to be handling the effects of Noah's flood and I felt priviliged to be allowed to keep the fossils I mined for my collection.
GRI Field School 2004 was the experience of a lifetime. It was meticulously organized and professionally executed. I left the sessions with increased faith in God and greater confidence in HIs word. I was encouraged by the scientists of GRI who are committed to corroborating the Scriptures by Science but who do not need science to validate the Scriptures.