"Neither of these things I can know with any confidence other than the written or oral testimony of others. These can only be corroboratory evidences."

Is this similar to your reading of Genesis? You accept it as beyond reasonable doubt but 'hardly as absolute'?

"Now you're opening up a cat amongst Pandora's can of worms."

Golly, Dan. I was thinking more along the lines of worming open the Pandorica amongst Schrödinger's Sous-vide of cats.

"And which of us here has psychological problems?" How much time have you got? But, seriously folks... I did phrase it as "... the more interesting issue of what *their* psychological problems are!", since none of us here are fundamentalists, remember?

For one, I don't have any psychological problems. My certificate of release from the facility says so.

Dan,

Hospital records. Eye-witness accounts of nurses, mid-wives, your mother, various bureaucrats. If anybody tried to refute the possibility that you have been born, they would be pushing it. I don't know if Jesus could say the same.

And I don't know of any cats existing on a diet of worms.

Cheap shots, but great fun !

Joe

Joe,
Diet of Worms!  :) 

I don't doubt the details of my birth.That's the point. We rely on and have confidence in the written records and the testimony given, even though we can't 'prove' any of it in some kind of logical or scientific sense. As it happened, my family emigrated to Australia soon after I was born. My parents lost my birth certificate, and I never saw my birth city again until I was 31 y.o.

We actually know quite a fair bit of detail about the birth of Jesus from the written records. We know the place, the time (roughly), his parental lineage in great detail, and even what presents he got from visiting dignitaries.

WmTrevor, you may be catching the drift of what I was trying to say. To answer your question, to what degree do I accept Genesis? I accept Genesis as an accurate historical account. To do so requires faith and confidence in the written records. But this is corroborated by the weight of available evidence. 

This is not to say that the creation case is without its difficulties. And the same would be said for the evolution case. Neither can be 'proven' in an absolute sense, as both are a kind of malleable metaphysical model. They're theories of history, and as such will not be proven or disproven. But we offer evidence in support of our case. And I'm satisfied by this explanation given the weight of all available evidence, historical, logical, and empirical.

(And I got through this whole post without once mentioning the word 'fundamentalist', a word which risks becoming obsolete unless someone can give it a useful and workable definition.)