Yes, Genesis 1-11 is a series of eyewitness accounts and may be taught as such.
Which my husband and I do, with plenty of real, actual science to back it up.
In response to Craig's post above:
1. There is no evidence aside from interpretations that any protobacteria was ever able to evolve into a bear, fern, moth, or anything else. Mutations ALWAYS reduce specificity and there is no way evolution could proceed with a progressive lack of specificity!
2. The size of the Ark was not the point regarding water displacement, the shape of it was. For instance, we live in Grants Pass, Oregon, where a major tourist attraction in the summer is jetboat rides on the Rogue River. Those boats displace only 18" of water and yet can safely carry 50+ people at a time.
3. The Ark was plenty big enough to carry samples from each KIND of animal (way different from species!). Since all animals on the Ark were hebivorous prior to the flood, there was no need to worry about them eating each other! Partitions would have been useful, however, for a couple of other reasons: to keep weight evenly distributed, and to keep the big guys from accidently trampling the little guys. Partitions would have also helped by allowing some of the animals to go into partial or full hibernation during that year. Whether or not they did, I have no idea, but if they did, the partitions would have given them the space they needed.
4. It does not take nearly the skill to compress hay and such into pellets as it does to build an Ark! In addition, animals under stress, which they probably were at least some of the time, rarely eat as much as in non-stress times. Keeping in mind that the average size was probably no larger than a sheep, and perhaps smaller, there was plenty of room for plenty of food for all on board.
5. Many of the animals would undoubtedly have preferred fresh food, but they would have been able to get along without it for a year, surviving on dried and compressed foodstuffs. This is still possible.
6. The Bible says distinctly that only land and air animals were on the Ark. Fish had plenty of water outside of it!
7. Land plants would have mostly been destroyed but there were several means of repopulation of plants after the Flood: from seeds that were part of the foodstuff on the Ark and not consumed that year, from seeds and spores not destroyed by the Flood but preserved on floating vegetation mats (which still can be seen after monsoons today and provide good evidence of what was possible), from seeds preserved whole in the guts of some of the animals, just like today.
8. There would have been enough food on the Ark to sustain the animals for the entire year, as God required. The animals were not released until an OLIVE leave was brought back. Hard seed plants grow much more slowly than grasses, so there would have already been abundant grasses by the time the animals were released. Those animals which now had to depend on flesh since their protein-rich plant foods were decimated would have found immediate meals available in the massive populations of rodents which would have been breeding on the Ark for a year (poor Mrs. Noah!).
9. What we see today in dietary needs of herbivores is the result of several thousand years of reduced ability to vary in the populations and reduced specificity due to mutations. The earlier animals would have been much more robust and been able to survive on more different kinds of vegetation than our pickier eaters today.
10. There would have been no problem with releasing the animals all in the same place as the carnivores were not yet used to hunting, but rather were used to being fed by the family on the Ark. This would have given the larger grazing animals plenty of time to move away. In addition, we have no rcord of Noah knowing ahead of time how long the time on the Ark would last, and so there is no reason to suspect that he only had food for one exact year. He probably had more than that, and animals off the Ark were still able to eat the last of the food for awhile.
11. Noah did not have to collect the animals. God caused the animals to come to him. Gen. 7:8
12. Yes, all old habitats were destroyed by the Flood. There were a bunch of new ones to be filled.
13. People were not necessary for the habitats to be restored. God grows plants just fine all by Himself.
14. There was plenty of water to cover all the earth. It is in the ocean basins today.
15. I doubt very much there are any real sightings of the Ark. So far all have been shown to be the result of natural formations and 'tricks' played by the light at certain times of day. Since there was no wood to build from after the Flood, it seems to me that it would have been silly for Noah to leave that perfectly good bit of construction alone and not dismantled it to use the wood for new homes and such.
16. Mt. Ararat (if that is indeed where the Ark landed) was not as sharp and as high as now until the time of Peleg, several hundred years later, when the continental movement caused the crumpling of the earth's crust, giving rise to the highest and sharpest of our current mountain ranges.
The Flood is not a matter, by the way, of man's rationality, but of God's judgment and of the natural forces He used to cause it. It was a real event. Noah and family were real people. The Ark was real, the disaster was real, the salvation through it was real. Jesus also referred to it as a real event.
There is very good evidence that Genesis is a series of eyewitness accounts and not something handed down as a matter of story-telling. This consideration is referred to as the Tablet Hypothesis, and is being taken seriously by more and more OT scholars now. It was started by Wiseman in the thirties when he realized that the oldest of tablets we have from the Middle East all have the author's 'signature' and the title of the document at the end of it, not at the beginning. We see this exact pattern in Genesis, where the authors 'sign off' of their tablets. If this is true, and I personally believe it is, then yes, God Himself wrote down Genesis 1:1-2:4a. After all, He also wrote the Ten Commandments Himself with His own finger in stone for Moses...He is, after all, a literate God. A good explanation of the Tablet Hypothesis was done by Curt Sewell (he is dying of cancer now, but was one of those who worked on the Manhattan Project in WWII. His trip to faith in Christ is chronicled in his book "God at Ground Zero"). His essay can be found on the net here:
http://www.ldolphin.org/tablethy.html
It should also be noted that when Luke wrote Luke and Acts, he was both interviewing live witnesses (the Book of Luke) and living the events as an eyewitness (Acts).
I am truly amazed that someone as knowledgeable as Craig has missed so much of what Genesis has to say, as well as the fact that the rest of the Bible testifies to its historical reality.
