Bible Literalists are a dying breed, most believers in the bible these days take a lot of it as allegory and parable, with several layers of meaning.
The WT still pretends to believe it literally, talking of Noah as a real person and in one of the latest ragmags talking of the "global flood" !!!
Taking the bible as literally as the WT and other weirdo fundie type sects do is a relatively new thing that started in the late 19th century and was espoused by C.T Russell.
It started as a reaction to Darwin and to the , mainly German, new biblical scholarship which rightly cast doubt on many aspects of the received texts, and on the original writings, as being very reliable. This caused doubt as to both inerrancy and inspiration, hence the literalist backlash.
To try to defend the literal meaning and claims of the bible in this 21st century is a nonsense, and often the WT and their ilk show an abysmal ignorance of science, modern scholarship, and even of the bible books themselves and how they were originally intended to be read, and understood and used.
