The history of literalism is actually far more complex and subtle than my thirty-second summary.There's much debate over how literally the ancients took the Bible. Some religious scholars - including Karen Armstrong and Marcus Borg - argue they didn't take it literally at all. These scholars say the ancients saw the Bible stories as myth - true on a deep metaphorical level, not as hard fact. It wasn't supposed to be reportage like The Wall Street Journal. Borg quotes a Georgian aphorism: "It is true, and it is not true."

Most scholars agree that at some point - after the Gutenberg Bible was printed? after the Renaissance? - believers started taking the Bible as factual, literal truth. And it was this literal interpretation of the Bible that spawned the dueling worldviews of modernism and fundamentalism. To complicate matters further, there are many alternatives to modernism and fundamentalism. For instance, geneticist Francis Collins wrote The Language of God, about how religion and science can be reconciled.

In Jewish biblical interpretation, the literal meaning of a passage is sometimes called pshat and the interpretation is called derush. And if you want to get really technical, there are four levels of biblical interpretation in traditional Judaism: "pshat (the literal meaning of the text), remez (its allusions), derush (the homilies that can be derived from it), and sod (its mystical secrets)." They spell out the acronym pardes, which means orchard (from the Lubavitcher website sichosinenglish.org).