The problem with trying to interpret the bible to get to truth is not in the interpreting, it's in the source material. It's a book full of horrifying tales, monstrous moral agents and a few bits of wisdom that have been stumbled upon by basically every culture at one point or another. If you assume that it has some special truth in it, you either end up a fundamentalist with absolutely wretched morality or you twist yourself up in all kinds of mental contortionist knots trying to interpret an internally inconsistent text to hide it's abhorrent realities.
Interpretation is absolutely vital to get to fundamental truths. Without interpretation you simply have a bunch of facts. It takes interpretation to get from the facts of the constancy of the speed of light and the equivalence of inertial and gravitational mass to get to the general theory of relativity. It's interpretation that allows us to generalize data to get to facts. Of course there are certain techniques to interpreting things effectively (e.g. occam's razor) but when done correctly, simple and fundamental truths can be discovered.
In your story it was not a lack of interpretation that got scientists to a better outcome, it was applying effective techniques of interpretation. The people interpreting it as god's anger were making two flawed assumptions - that there is some divine entity that involves itself in human affairs, and that this entity was responsible for the event. Scientists are generally much better trained in interpreting data effectively - they applied occam's razor and avoided initial assumptions that were completely unsupported.
If you want to get to truth, first look at your starting assumptions and make sure they're justified, then weigh the possible interpretations by their complexity and fit to the data, and take the one that has the highest probability of being correct.
