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Jiro comments on Talking Snakes: A Cautionary Tale - Less Wrong
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There seems a tacit assumption here that all people who read the bible believe it is to be taken literally. Now I'm not stating my own religious views or lack thereof here, but it seems to me that this "talking snake" approach fails on entirely other grounds... namely, that it assumes that the "talking snake" story is not an allegory or metaphor. These are very old stories, told in a very poetic voice, and to take them literally is certainly absurd... It seems to me that Maher joins the absurdity by assuming the premise that "all things in the bible are to be taken literally." This is NOT a premise believed by all or even most Christians. Many interpret the bible and it's stories in an attempt to glean the meanings of those stories. Naturally there are ignorami who DO believe that the bible is to be taken literally. To extrapolate their beliefs to all Christians is to perpetrate the most basic of logical mistakes: if A is B, and A is C, then all B's are C. (e.g., If Bob is a Christian, and Bob believes in talking snakes, then all Christians believe in talking snakes.)
You have more certainty than I do.
It could have been meant literally at some point, and the claim "it is there only as a metaphor" could have been inserted afterwards. If it traces back to a pre-Christian creation myth that got to be part of the Bible as an accident of history, it probably was meant literally at some point, and not just in a "this weird sect takes it literally" way, but in how it was generally understood.
Furthermore, there are other passages in the Bible that are not taken literally now, but were taken literally recently enough for that to have happened within recorded history. People only began to say they shouldn't be taken literally when taking them literally became embarrassing.
Reply to an old comment about literalism:
Yes, but every version of the Torah we have contains parts from different, incompatible versions of the story. The Redactor who put them together had a clear preference (I think) for the Priestly text, but was willing to include stories that contradicted it (at least as a political compromise).