I was raised to be a weird sort of fair-weather literalist. As in my dad said things like “Maybe fossils are just decoration God put there, and maybe the world is only about 10,000 years old. Maybe.”
I prefer to think of it as though God created the universe such that no matter how much we learn about our planet or our universe, there’s always much much more that we then realize that we still don’t know yet. Or, as Einstein put it, “as our circle of knowledge expands, so does the circumference of darkness surrounding it.” And it’s not just that we are created in God’s image, but the universe and everything in it is. Everything you yourself create says something about the nature of who you are. And the idea that there’s always so much more to learn about the universe and that we can’t ever learn everything there is to know says the same thing about God.
And yet, at the same time, God became a man so that we could know him; we could identify with him and he with us; and the sacrifice that was paid on our behalf allows us to pursue that relationship.
God gave us the ability to be curious about our universe and the capacity to learn. To be super-literal about the nitpicky bits of one’s doctrine, if I might extend the house-built-on-rock metaphor, is like building the house itself using extremely rigid materials such that when an earthquake shakes it, it crumbles due to its own structural inflexibility (which actually has happened in real life). While it is important to have a solid foundation, it is also wise to have flexible structural supports so that (for example) increasing scientific knowledge does not create a stumbling block for one’s faith.