I don't know if any of you like Joseph Campbell but the more of his material I read the better I understand his intent. For a long time I wasn't sure if he was a literalist or not, but there are several places where he makes it pretty clear he is not.

After spending a lifetime thinking I was an atheist, I have recently come to a renewed appreciation, well maybe my first real appreciation, of religion (myth) as an emergent quality of human nature, which cannot be understood properly outside a context of allegory, or symbolic reflections of deep human psychology; evolutionary psychology.

CAMPBELL:
"What do we learn? Well, we learn that over the entire inhabited world, in spite of many colorful and distracting variations of nomenclature and costumes, the episodes and personages of myth, legend, fairytale, and fable remain, and have remained throughout all time, essentially the same. Also we learn that these mysteriously constant personages and episodes are precisely those that have been upsetting or delighting us in our personal fantasies and dreams. Oedipus and Orestes, the Sun Bird and the Serpent are known not only to the scholar’s study but also to the lunatic asylum and the nightly pillow. Mythology, in other words, is not an outmoded quaintness of the past, but a living complex of archetypal, dynamic images, native to, and eloquent of, some constant, fundamental stratum of the human psyche. And that stratum is the source of the vital energies of our being. Out of it proceed all the fate-creating drives and fears of our lives. While our educated, modern waking-consciousness has been going forward on the wheels and wings of progress, this recalcitrant, dream-creating, wish-creating, under-consciousness has been holding to its primeval companions all the time, the demons and the gods.

Apparently, then, the archetypal figures of myth undercut the rational interests of our conscious life, and touch directly the vital centers of the unconscious. The artist who knew how to manipulate these archetypes would be able to conjure with the energies of the human soul. For the symbols are as potent as they ever were. The artist who really knew their secrets might still play the magician—the priest of the potent sign—working marvels purging the community of its pestilential devils and bringing purity and peace. Only, we should tend to explain his effects in psychological rather than theological terms: the heavens and hells being now reinterpreted as chambers of the unconscious.And we should revere him no less than he was revered in the days of yore, when his poems conjured thunderheads and his dances moved the spirits of the soil." (Joseph Campbell, The Ecstasy of Being. New World Library. 2017 pp 18-19,)

It's clear Campbell regarded mythology as a closer relative of the arts than the sciences, and a timeless, vital resource for the seeker of emotional balance and enrichment... but not an attempt to describe the causes and effects of the material world.