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Jiro comments on A Parable On Obsolete Ideologies - Less Wrong
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I think the claim isn't quite "it has a mistake, therefore it can't be meant to be interpreted at face value" but "it has a really glaringly obvious mistake, therefore it can't be meant to be interpreted at face value".
That's a lot more sensible, and using this principle doesn't make you incapable of recognizing mistakes. It does make you incapable of recognizing when the people who put together your sacred text did something incredibly stupid, but maybe that's OK.
Except that I think another reasonable interpretation is: whoever edited the text into a form that contains both stories did notice that they are inconsistent, didn't imagine that somehow they are both simultaneously correct, but did intend them to be taken at face value -- the implicit thinking being something like "obviously at least one of these is wrong somewhere, but both of them are here in our tradition; probably one is right and the other wrong; I'll preserve them both, so that at least the truth is in here somewhere".
If this sort of thing is possible -- and I think it's very plausible -- then the inference from "glaring inconsistency" to "intended metaphorically or something like that" no longer works. On the other hand, in that case you at least have some precedent for it being OK not to assume that everything in the text is literally correct.
The trouble with this is that the Bible contains a number of other really glaringly obvious mistakes that believers do have to explain away, but which they explain away in some manner other than "that's a metaphor".
The Bible also contains examples where believers say "well, it's literally wrong, so it has to be a metaphor" even when the above reasoning doesn't really apply (such as cases where the apparent mistake is glaringly obvious to us now, but would not have been glaringly obvious to the people who put the Bible together).
Few that are quite as glaring as this one, I think.
For the avoidance of doubt, I am not attempting any general defence of the thinking and behaviour of religious believers in general or Christians in particular. (I'm an atheist myself -- though I was a pretty serious Christian for many years, and have quite a good idea of how they think.)