Reddit mentions of Immortality, Resurrection and the Age of the Universe: A Kabbalistic View (English and Hebrew Edition)

for an excellent treatment of this topic, check out rabbi aryeh kaplan's immortality, resurrection, and the age of the universe

(C) 1979 Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan.
>One, the very simplest, is that 6000 years ago,
HaShem created the universe with a history. There is a
certain logic to this, and one may even find a hint of it in
the Gemara. If HaShem created a tree, did the tree have
rings or not? If it had rings, then it had a history.

>This can be extrapolated to all of life. Every creature
has to have had a parent, so that we have a history going
way, way back. HaShem could have easily created the
universe to appear as if it were no more than 6000 years
old.

>The difficulty is that one could use a similar
argument to say that HaShem created the universe five
minutes ago. There is no question that an omnipotent God
certainly could have created us all with our memories, with
all the records, and with all our histories. It is very possible to say that the world was created five minuets ago. But this weakens the above argument. If it is possible that
HaShem created the world 6000 years ago, then everything
is possible.

>Of course, it is an irrefutable argument. Therefore, if
one feels comfortable with it, I would say all well and good. But I think that it has problems. It touches almost on
intellectual dishonesty and sophism. It presents us with
more problems than it answers. It seems to make all of
Judaism depend on a glib argument.

>But there is an even more serious problem. In no
place in Torah literature do we find that HaShem created
the universe so that it should appear to be billions of years old. If not for current scientific discoveries, no one would have ever made such a statement based on Torah sources
alone. Therefore, this approach is nothing more than
apologetics.

>There is another approach that I will mention in
passing. That is, that each of the “days” of creation was
really thousands of years long. This approach is hinted at
in Rabbeinu Bechayay, who mentions it only to refute it.
He says explicitly that the world was created in six days of
twelve hours each, for a total of 72 hours. Moreover, we
keep Shabbos because there were six days of creation,
where each day was just like one of our days.

>Moreover, there is no support in classic Torah
literature for saying that the days of creation were more
than 24 hours long. Besides this, there is the problem that
plant life was created before the sun, moon, and stars, and
this would not fit into any accepted scientific cosmology. I
will admit that the Zohar states that plant life was created
after the sun, moon, and stars, but this raises other
difficulties which go beyond the scope of our discussion.

More here or in Kaplan's book.