There are three major streams of Judaism, with each stream holding very different views. Neither Reform Jews nor Conservative Jews believe that the Torah and the book of Genesis are of divine origin. If one does not accept the divinity of Scripture and thinks that Genesis is merely a collection of writings of ancient people, then, of course, it follows that there is no reason to expect to find any correspondence between modern science and the Torah.

But Orthodox Jews are characterized by their belief in the divinity of the Torah. Among Orthodox Jews, there are two main groups: Haredi Orthodox Jews, who believe that every word in Genesis must be understood literally, and Modern Orthodox Jews (the group to which I belong), who believe that the Torah and Genesis sometimes speak in allegories and parables, and therefore, although every word in Genesis is the word of G-d, not every word must be understood in its simplest literal meaning. Moses Maimonides, universally recognized by all Orthodox Jews as the greatest Jewish scholar in the last thousand years, held the latter view and expounded it in his major treatise, The Guide for the Perplexed, Part II, Chapter 25.

Nathan Aviezer is a professor of physics at Bar Ilan University.