I don’t read the Bible literally. I read it plainly meaning read it in context. History is read as history, poetry as poetry and allegory as allegory etc.
Yet I see made up stories all the time from evolutionists who tell tales about the supposed lives of dinosaurs millions of years ago, stuff they can’t possibly know, but have somehow deduced from a fossil. It’s creative story telling at its finest and you people have no problem believing that. same with the “missing link” they seem to find every few years.
Of course not. That's because you're ignorant.
The Torah was not written by "people" at all. It was written by G-d. And it was not written "thousands of years ago." It was written 974 generations before the universe was created, "on a scroll of white fire in letters of black fire." In the 974th generation of mankind it was then dictated to Moses letter-for-letter, and Moses wrote it down.
This is the immemorial tradition going all the way back to Sinai. This is why all kosher Torah scrolls are hand-written in accordance to the strictest rules imaginable--to assure that each kosher scroll will be a copy of the Original Scroll. This is why the sizes, shapes, and crowns of letters are so carefully prescribed and even the spaces between and among the letters. It is an altogether Divine work, the blueprint of the Creation. It is what chr*stians call the "logos," the DNA of the creation from which the universe is wholly derivative. In fact, the closest we'll ever come to knowing "why" G-d created the universe is "so Israel can observe the Torah." If you have Biblical fonts on your computer I can refer you to an excellent site with the original Hebrew letters.
However, it is very true that there are indeed Orthodox Jewish evolutionists--many "Modern Orthodox" and also charedim as well. One example of these is the late Rabbi 'Aryeh Kaplan (zt"l), who was a Sefaradi scholar and mystic from Salonika in Greece, and a very learned scientist to boot. However, even here, the "evolution" espoused is very different from that of secular evolutionists, as almost all Orthodox Jews (again, not all) insist that once Adam arrives on the scene all the events narrated in the Torah happened exactly as written within the traditional time frame. Rabbi Kaplan believed in a sort of "gap theory" in which the myriad worlds created and destroyed by HaShem before this one all took place on this earth and the fossils are the remnants of them. Other great rabbis like Rebbe Schneerson (zt"l) rejected this and insisted on an absolutely literal interpretation of Genesis with the prior "worlds" as purely spiritual entities. Personally, I hold with the latter view because zillions of years were simply unnecessary for G-d to create and form a universe whose laws never even began to function until the Sixth Day of creation when it was completed. Pardon the observation, but the assumption that the natural processes we witness today go "all the way back" unchanged and brought the universe into being is simply unnecessary.