And this is according to whom? Based on literary analysis that shows the author's intentions? I doubt it. Most liberal believers only say this in order to soften dogmas that sound awkward to hold in a 21st century world (like those who reject evolution and adhere to a creation myth).
That's kind of accurate about liberal believers... but having gone to school with a number of them, I know more than a few who were dragged kicking and screaming away from literalism, by mountains and escarpments of research.
I know that the opening of Genesis was not meant to be taken literally, and I was dragged spitting and pounding to that conclusion. When I had no data to tell me anything to the contrary, that's how I believed it, and when I ran into such data I was suspicious as -- well, as hell.
But the literary types of Genesis 1 - 2 appear in various languages throughout the ancient near east... and neither of those types is anywhere near what we would think of as literal; they are, in fact, so far from it that if they understood our concept, the original hearers (those accounts were meant to be heard, not read) would regard us at daft at best for thinking the words were meant that way.
The problem is that supernatural content of the Bible even by liberal theists is taken literally at least some of the time. For example, believing that Jesus was born of a virgin, that he and God are one (if you are a Trinitarian Christian), is ritually murdered as a scapegoat for the collective sins of his species, and then resurrected from death after an interval of three days, promptly ascending, bodily, to heaven where he awaits for two millennia eavesdropping upon (and, on occasion, even answering) the simultaneous prayers of billions of beleaguered human beings, returning one day to judge the living the dead. These are literal beliefs that even the most liberal Catholic will subscribe to. Saying that some supernatural stories are not to be taken literally while others are begs the question of just what protocol of approaching this text is used to determine which supernatural claims are true and which aren't. If it comes down to faith, then the fundamentalist and the moderate are on the same level -- the only difference being that the latter is more pleasant. As far as theologically sound, they are both cherry pickers.
Ah -- the flaw here is "this text".
Even assuming you think that Moses actually put pen to surface (stylus to clay? feather to leather?) and wrote the "Books of Moses", the number of writers of the Bible is no less than two-score. Yet even if you believe that, it's plain that Moses was lifting substantial amounts, some intact, some intermingled, from previous sources; carry that observation throughout and the number of penmen is more on the order of four-score.
Writers aside, there's the matter of literary genre/type; in Genesis alone, 'Moses' used five distinct ones (that I can recall off the top of my head) -- take in the whole set of five books included under his name, and it hits eight or more.
And that's just the launch pad -- it doesn't touch the Prophets or the 'Writings', which bring new genres all their own.
Each has its own principles of interpretation, its own level of 'factualness', and that level can vary between writers (a good example is the different numbers of warriors reported at certain battles in different 'history' books; different writers regard different numbers of significant figures as important). Beyond that are different conventions in dating and even in counting.
Sometimes the writers are helpful for us late-day readers; they tell us what's a dream, what's a parable, what's a comparison, what's a symbol -- but sometimes they aren't (and even then, when we speak of "symbol" in the Bible we don't mean what the word commonly means in English). It doesn't help that they employ things which to us look like metaphors, but which to them weren't at all; it helps less that their languages were in some ways more precise than ours and in other ways less so, to the point that such simple words as "then", "and", or "the" can be misleading if translated directly across.
A very, very good rule of thumb for finding out what can be taken firmly as solid, central theological truth is to read the early church fathers, because they were the closest to the eruption of Christianity into human society, closest to the officially authorized ambassadors (the apostles). Where they -- and the next couple of generations -- agree, it's set, and that's that... which is why assent to the Trinitarian nature of the Godhead is a defining matter for being a Christian (and thusly Seventh-Day-Adventism is Christian, while Mormonism is not).
It also makes churches which ignore the church fathers
highly suspect.
Anyway... didn't mean to go into lecture mode. In short, as with a body of data in any field of study, the interpretation depends on the instrument, the scale of measurement, the observer, and all that, so when dealing with a collection as large as the Bible, getting down to what is to be taken how is not a quick and simple matter -- but it isn't a totally hopeless venture.
