Creation

You are making the mistake of asking a very difficult question as if it had a simple answer.First, even if the universe had a beginning, that doesn't necessarily mean that God created it. It could have come from nothing, as Lawrence Krauss says, or it may have come from something in an earlier universe.Second, the universe may not have had a beginning in time, in the sense that there was a time when the universe didn't exist and a later time when it did exist. Time, or rather space-time, is an essential part of the universe; if time already existed, it was part of a universe. So far as I understand it, time began with the universe, so there was no time when the universe didn't exist. (This is very difficult to understand.)Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, in 'The Grand Design' (page 172) explain it like this:

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In the early universe - when the universe was small enough to be governed by both general relativity and quantum theory - there were effectively four dimensions of space and none of time. That means that when we speak of the "beginning" of the universe, we are skirting the subtle issue that that as we look backwards towards the very early universe, time as we know it does not exist! We must accept that our usual ideas of space and time do not apply to the very early universe. ... If in the early universe all four dimensions behave like space, what happens to the beginning of time.

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The realization that time can behave like another direction of space means one can get rid of the problem of time having a beginning, in the same way in which we got rid of the edge of the world.

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I hope that this attempt at an answer helps you to understand that your question, as you phrased it, over-simplifies a very complex matter, and that there is no simple answer to it.

There appear to be only two possibilities: that the age of the universe is infinite, i.e. that the universe is eternal; or that the age of the universe is finite. The fact that the Bible picked the correct one doesn't prove that it was inspired by a god, any more than predicting that a die will give a number between 1 and 3 and then getting the number 2 proves that one is supernaturally inspired.Also, the second possibility doesn't necessarily mean that the universe had a beginning as we understand the world, any more than the fact that the Earth's surface area is finite means that one can fall over the edge. How long ago do you think that the beginning of the universe was? And if the universe didn't begin with the Big Bang, how do you think it began? Saying that the fact that the universe had a beginning proves that God created the universe is as daft as saying that the fact that my life had a beginning proves that I was brought to my parents by a stork!As I said, there are only two possibilities, an eternal universe or a universe with some sort of beginning, so the author of the first chapter of Genesis had a 50% chance of being right. However, the first chapter of Genesis also says that the Earth existed before the Sun and the stars, and that plants existed before the Sun, so I don't think that Genesis (or God's Word, if you prefer it) has a particularly good record of scientific accuracy.Edited by Astrophile, : No reason given.

What reason have you got to think that the authors of Genesis 1, Job and Isaiah believed that the universe was expanding, other than a wish to make out that these writers anticipated modern cosmology. It seems more likely to me that the Biblical authors thought of God setting up the firmament as a canopy over the flat Earth, as a human being would set up a tent on the ground.