I feel that most of us involved in this discussion are thinking that the whole universe, in its current form, was created in a fraction of a second, which certainly is an idea that beats human reasoning. As far as my understanding goes, the 0.00000000000000001 sec that IPHONE mentioned is the split second within which the big bang happened. Before the big bang, all the matter that is present in the universe was concentrated in a highly dense but incredibly small area (that's why the study of the big bang is closely related to the study of black holes). After the big bang, everything started to move apart and as a result the universe has been in a continuous phase of expansion since the big bang.