Genesis 1:1

1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

Questions: How long ago was the beginning? What happened before the beginning? Who is God? What is heaven? What is the earth? When was this written? Who is the author? Who is the audience? Is this compatible with science and reason?

My current understanding of science provides an answer to some of these questions. The beginning was the Big Bang, a sudden and unfathomably immense expansion of space and a proliferation of energy, which congealed into forces and the simplest, tiniest, atoms. If you're unfamiliar with any of this, dive into some youtube videos :)

I don't know what happened before the beginning, and it seems a difficult question to even begin to tackle.

From the text, we only know that God is or was a creator, and that God existed in the beginning, but maybe not today, and maybe not before. We do not know how God created the heaven, and there is no natural understanding of the concept of heaven. I live on Earth, and I understand the word earth as the dirt, the ground that I stand upon, but is this the way I should understand it as intended by the author?

A google search tells me that this book is the end product of a complex literary process—written, oral, or both—that did not come to a close until the exile (586-539 BC) and may have had several sources and authors, though the traditional view was that Moses had written this book and the next 4 books of the bible, called the Pentateuch.

This passage seems to imply that the earth and the universe (or heaven) were created simultaneously. Our current scientific hypothesis is that the universe is 13.8 billion years old, and the earth is 4.8 billion years old. Perhaps heaven does not mean universe in general, but it is not clear so far from the text what is going on. For the author and audience at the time, this may have been a sufficient explanation, and they certainly did not know what we know today, but for me, the modern scientific explanation of the beginning of the universe is a more beautiful verse:

"The universe begins with a cataclysm that generates space and time, as well as all the matter and energy the universe will ever hold."

-LXE