[dragonwriter]

> Maybe, if one doesn't take the Bible literally, but as a metaphor? But then again, for thousands of years the Church said we should interpret it literally.

No, the canon wasn't even set thousands of years ago (so there wasn't a single accepted Bible to take literally or metaphorically), and Biblical literalism as a doctrine is a minority doctrine in Christianity that is only a few hundred years old, originating within Protestantism, and mostly became a big deal with the explosion of fundamentalism in the US even more recently than that.

The Catholic Church didn't even think laypeople should read the Bible until fairly recently, one of the main concerns being the danger of naive interpretation, which simple literalism would surely qualify as.