Jewish views on evolution includes a continuum of views about evolution, creationism, and the origin of life. Some Jewish denominations accept evolutionary creationism (theistic evolution).
Classical Rabbinic Teachings
The vast majority of classical Rabbis hold that God created the world close to 6,000 years ago, and created Adam and Eve from clay. This view is based on a chronology developed in a midrash, Seder Olam, which was based on a literal reading of the book of Genesis. It is considered to have been written by the Tanna Yose ben Halafta, and cover history from the creation of the universe to the construction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem. This chronology is widely accepted among most of Orthodox Judaism today.
A small minority of classical rabbis believed that the world is older, and that life as we know it today did not always exist. Rabbis who had this view based their conclusions on verses in the Talmud the midrash. For example:
Talmud Chaggiga 13b-14a states that there were 974 generations before God created Adam.
Some midrashim state that the "first week" of Creation lasted for extremely long periods of time. See Anafim on Rabbenu Bachya's Sefer Ikkarim 2:18; Midrash Bereshit Rabbah 9.
Moses Maimonides says that science is one of the routes to the love and fear of God.
Medieval Rabbinic Teachings
Some medieval philosophical rationalists, such as Maimonides held that it was not required to read Genesis literally. In this view, one was obligated to understand Torah in a way that was compatible with the findings of science. Indeed, Maimonides, one of the great rabbis of the Middle Ages, wrote that if science and Torah were misaligned, it was either because science was not understood or the Torah was misinterpreted. Maimonides argued that if science proved a point, then the finding should be accepted and scripture should be interpreted accordingly. Rabbi Yitzchak of Akko(a 12th-century student of Maimonides, agreed with this view.
Jewish philosophy tells us that the world is a single, unified system. This means that the universe makes sense—that one part shouldn’t conflict with another—and allows for deductive reasoning. If you see A, B and C over here, it will also make sense over there, in another environment. It also means that scientific discovery will eventually parallel biblical claims. For instance, the Big Bang theory says that the universe began from a single burst of energy, and that this energy has taken the form of matter. All ancient commentaries have said that this beginning was a physical creation, and now, thousands of years later, science has come to match that understanding. Everything is the energy of creation in its present form.
In his commentary on the Torah, Rabbi Bahya ben Asher (11th century, Spain) concludes that there were many time systems occurring in the universe long before the spans of history that man is familiar with. Based on the Kabbalah he calculates that the Earth is billions of years old.
Rabbi Israel Lipschitz of Danzig (1800s) gave a famous lecture on Torah and paleontology, which is printed in the Yachin u-Boaz edition of the Mishnah, after Massechet Sanhedrin. He writes that Kabbalistic texts teach that the world has gone through many cycles of history, each lasting for many tens of thousands of years. He links these teachings to findings about geology from European, American and Asian geologists, and from findings from paleontologists. He discusses the wooly mammoth discovered in 1807 Siberia, Russia, and the remains of several then-famous dinosaur skeletons recently unearthed. Finding no contradiction between this and Jewish teachings, he states "From all this, we can see that all the Kabbalists have told us for so many centuries about the fourfold destruction and renewal of the Earth has found its clearest possible confirmation in our time."
If you look at the development of science over the centuries, it’s gone from a completely materialist view to one that includes both the physical and the non-physical. Hundreds of years ago, Newton had a completely materialist view of the world, but in the 20th century, that gave way to Einstein’s theory of relativity. Twenty or 30 years after that came quantum physics, which examines the very small. When you get down to this level, the physical world literally evaporates, and the world becomes pure information. The quantum physics view of the world is a mix of the physical and the metaphysical—and starts to sound a bit theological.
It is understood in Judaism that the first and second chapters of B'reshith (Genesis) is not to be taken literally, because the text is esoteric in nature. The Jews do not believe, like the Christian Archbishop James Ussher, that the world was created in 4004 BCE.
Science tells us that our universe is approx. 13.8 billion years old. What does Judaism say on the matter? Isaac ben Samuel of Acre (fl. 13th-14th century) was a Jewish mystic and a disciple of Nahmanides. Using his methodology, one "could calculate" the current "known age of our universe" thusly:
First off, you take the current Jewish calendar year (presently 5779) and multiply it by a Sabbatical Cycle of 7, which gives us a total of 40,453 Sabbatical Years. Secondly, one should take note that Psalms 90:4 has it that 1,000 years is as 1 day in the sight of the Deity. So, you take the 365.25 days of the Solar Year (and yes, the Jewish Rabbis use a lunisolar calendar) and multiply it by 1,000 Divine Years, which gives us a total of 365,250 Divine Years. Lastly, you simply multiply the aforementioned 40,453 Sabbatical Years by the 365,250 Divine Years, which gives you a total for the current "known age of the universe," that is to say, 14,775,458,250 years old.
Please note that as of 2013, using the latest models for stellar evolution, the estimated age of the oldest known star is 13.8 ± 0.8 billion years. Was Isaac ben Samuel of Acre privy to some esoteric knowledge?