In The Beginning

I have been having e-mail discussions with a good friend of mine about the origin and nature of the universe. If I am not misrepresenting him here, his position is that the universe and God are eternal (both have always existed and will exist forever), and that "afterlife places" (this is another discussion between us -- I will just say heaven/hell) exist within what we know as the universe. My position is God is eternal, but the universe is not -- it had a distinct beginning and will eventually end, and that heaven/hell exist outside of it. We both found each others' position hard to understand. :-)

This has little bearing on the point of this post, other than its background that got me thinking a little bit more about the age of the universe, which I consider as a separate argument from the age of the earth. There are three reasonable possibilities in my mind (many more if you want to tie actual numbers to any of these):

1) Young earth, young universe
2) Young earth, old universe
3) Old earth, old universe

There aren't four, because I don't see how you could have an old earth and young universe. Anyone that claims this probably needs to see some kind of doctor.

I did some searching on the Internet and found that there are creationists in all three camps arguing about why their view is correct and non-creationists in the third camp arguing about why their view is correct (I don't know of any non-creationists in the first two camps!). No one was of any particular help, but the arguments were interesting.

I accept that biblical and scientific evidence that points to a young earth, but I'm still curious if that means that the universe is also young.

I opened my Bible up to Genesis 1 and read it again:

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.

I had a thought that maybe, yes, in the beginning God made the universe, but this formless earth sat around for a long time before God did anything with it -- and then in six days He took this formless earth and made it into the earth we know. I don't know how popular this view is (I didn't see much about it ), but I found at least one other person that thought about it:

http://www.cs.unc.edu/~plaisted/ce/oldyoung.html

Regarding a young earth and young universe, this page gave a good summary of past theories that were pretty weak, and a good summary of a recent cosmological model proposed by Dr. Humphreys:

http://www.christiananswers.net/q-aig/aig-c005.html

In the end I'm probably more in the "young earth, young universe" camp then the "young earth, old universe" camp. Nailing down the age of the universe is not relevant to my salvation, but it makes for some interesting reading and discussion.

On a final note, in looking up information about the various arguments for the age of the earth and universe, I came across this page that gives a really good explanation of why Christians shouldn't blow off the young-earth versus old-earth discussion as irrelevant:

http://www.christiananswers.net/q-eden/edn-c026.html