The short version is that there are many places in the Bible that quote/reference the creation account in the book of Genesis literally (Exodus 16:16, Exodus 20:11, Exodus 31:17, Leviticus 23:3, Deuteronomy 5:13, Luke 13:14, etc).

The most obvious is the "reasoning" given for the 4th Commandment:


  Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a sabbath of the LORD your God .. For in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day


Furthermore, death was not introduced into creation until Adam sinned (Genesis 3:17-19, Romans 5:12, 8:20-22). Without death, you cannot have fossils.

The first of the genealogies of the Bible, which starts with the first man (Adam) and goes through Noah, is given in concrete years of the age of the father when the son was born. While I suppose you could elect to say that the first 5 days of creation were figurative, certainly from day 6 on is distinctly not figurative - otherwise the reckoning of Adam's age at the birth of Seth would be irrational.

What is the case for interpreting the Genesis creation account literally?
I have a utility method which reads an xml file and converts to string as below:

public static String readFile(String xmlFileName) throws IOException, DocumentException{
        String xmlMsg = null;
        Resource resource = null;
        InputStream inputStream = null;
        try{
            resource = new ClassPathResource(xmlFileName);
            inputStream = resource.getInputStream();
            SAXReader reader = new SAXReader();
            Document doc = reader.read( inputStream );
            xmlMsg = doc.asXML();
        }finally{
            if(inputStream != null){
                inputStream.close();
            }
        }
        return xmlMsg;
    }


Is it a bad idea if I catch the DocumentException in the above code and rethrow it as below:

public static String readFile(String xmlFileName) throws IOException, DocumentException{
        String xmlMsg = null;
        Resource resource = null;
        InputStream inputStream = null;
        try{
            resource = new ClassPathResource(xmlFileName);
            inputStream = resource.getInputStream();
            SAXReader reader = new SAXReader();
            Document doc = reader.read( inputStream );
            xmlMsg = doc.asXML();
        }catch (DocumentException e){
           throw new DocumentException("some message");
        }finally{
            if(inputStream != null){
                inputStream.close();
            }
        }
        return xmlMsg;
    }


So, is it a bad idea to leave the responsibility of handling the DocumentException to the caller?
