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Originally Posted by RickyMaveety
I had an argument with a minister (fundamentalist and Baptist) about this sort of thing ... around the time I left the Christian church (I guess I was about 15 ...). My thought back then was that even if you assumed that a god existed, I doubted that he was going to start his holy book with "In the beginning there was a immense explosion, and billions upon billions of years later, there was a coallessing of atoms ...." (I was a proponent of an expanding universe at a very early age ... steady state just didn't appeal to me.)
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I think one problem on the part of folks like that is a failure to comprehend infinity.
I'm bemused by the folks who think God created the heavens and the Earth in six days of 24 hours each, and rested on the seventh, and that this all took place about 4,000+ years ago. Since our 24 hour day comes from the rotation of the Earth facing the sun, and neither existed when God began, the idea that God's day is 24 of our hours long is a big assumption.
And aside from that, whether creation is 4,000+ years old or 14 billion years old doesn't matter. If we assume there is a God who is eternal, omnipotent, and omniscient, who had no beginning and will have no end, the entire time creation has existed is less than an eyeblink for Him.
Question 1 for the creationists is "What do you think God was doing in all of the uncountable eons
before he decided to create the heavens and the Earth? Why do you assume our cosmos is the only one He made?"
Question 2 is "And what did He do on the eighth day after he had rested? What makes you think he's
finished creating?"
For the first, I rather like the idea Olaf Stapledon proposed in _The Star Maker_. His Star Maker was an artist, learning its craft by doing, and ours was neither the only nor the last universe it would create. Stapledon had the Star Maker creating many universes, until it finally created the ultimate cosmos, the final flowering of its art, and would settle back and spend the rest of eternity contemplating it.
As for the second, I think He did just what we do after the day of rest: He went back to work. Our universe is a work in progress.
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He actually went to our house and asked my mother to make sure I didn't come to "his" church anymore. My mother informed him that she didn't want me living with braces on my brains, so she would make certain I didn't.
Yaaaay Mom!!! 
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Indeed. Your Mom was a seriously cool person.
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Dennis