jaywill, you sound like a jehovah's witness - they believe in things coming in two's (god for a start, Adam and Eve - correct me if I'm wrong) and three's, and have the same sort of...rationalization, compartmentalization that lets them say "it doesn't matter whether it was true, but it's true because the people in the bible believed it was true, and they wouldn't lie, because they're in the bible, which is true..."
it's circular logic - the original question was
how do christians know what is really true and what is meant to be allegory?. saying "it's true but it doesn't matter" is poorly side-stepping the point.
biblical literalists put their own made-up dates on everything, and blind themselves so much that they insist that Noah really existed, that his ark really existed, and that it was big enough to carry everything (including dinosaurs) despite having a known size which wasn't even big enough to carry the food necessary.
They believe the miracles like the feeding of the five thousand with even less questioning.
The rest of us are rightly uncomfortable with this position, because then it's believing in a magic sky-daddy that has apparently lost his powers and can no longer even do the smallest of miracles, or who turns a blind eye to suffering, or who simply doesn't answer all prayers like he said he would, or...well I could go on.
The empty answer given to that is "god works in mysterious ways".
you're right in that the whole bible is written (with a few obvious exceptions) as fact, but those facts don't stand up to modern day knowledge - the world is older than 6000 years, it's not flat, animals don't become stripy by looking at stripy objects, people don't rise from the dead, and only ignorance lets people believe the opposite.
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