I think that's what really irks atheists about religious people. That the religious approach tends more towards "we are right by definition" rather than actually explaining things.
Maybe its the simplistic nature of the approach that's annoying?
"See, if you drop something it falls to the earth because of a force known as gravity, gravity work like [explanations follow]"
"If you drop something it falls to the earth because god made it so"
"Metals have their specific properties because they have free electrons moving through the matter, making them more conductive. The electrons pull on the protons of the metal nuclei, but are still free, thus producing a matter that can bend but doesn't break easily. Oh, and electrons and protons are attracted because [etc.]"
"Metals are strong, bendable and conductive because god made them so"
Obviously, I'm over-simplifying things and slightly generalizing (so don't be offended), but I think that its that specific approach that upsets atheists the most.
I know it certainly upsets me, because I tend to enjoy a good debate, and there's no debate with arguments that quickly boil down to "I'm right by definition".

I've never really understood how looking into the past by viewing the distant universe could possibly allow one to view to any time period even close to The Big Bang. Wouldn't any light concerning that event have started out moving faster than our galaxy (therefore making it further ahead and unobservable)? Along the same lines, wouldn't we have been passed by light from, say, about half of the lifespan of the known universe as well (I may be being generous or stingy, I don't want to look up any numbers)? I'm probably missing something here, but how is that possible?

Anyway, on the whole subject, I usually say that I simply am not arrogant enough to believe I could ever know exactly what happened fifty years ago, let alone a few billion. That isn't to say anyone is wrong, just that I don't care how much evidence they have for whatever idea they are pushing as it takes far too much faith to believe it.

Current determinations of the age of the universe suggest it is 13.7Gyr old. Light that has travelled a distance of 13.7Gyr has been in transit since the universe began. In other words, looking at events that are 13.7 billion lightyears distant means you are looking at events that took place at the time the big bang was created.
What you're missing is that light always moves at the speed of light, independent of the observer and that the big bang did not occur at a specific location in space (in other words, it didn't happen 'here' or 'there', it happened everywhere).

That is my belief as a Christian too.

No. That's the point. If we are looking at stuff that is 13.7 billion light years away, we're looking at what happend 13.7 billion years ago.

Now, that is about the extent of my understanding of the space time stuff. I understand the idea behind it, but it is mind boggling to think of space as 4d space/time.

Also, I thought Big Bang happened and was long over, without taking into account if it is still going on or not, and without remembering the whole space/time aspect. Is the big bang "still going on?" By that, I mean can we still look billions of light years out and see the universe expanding?

That is where I'm lost. I really don't see how all matter could be condensed into an infinitely dense point and still have that point be everywhere. It fits with the theory that one could view back to the origin of time, but not with common sense.

It still doesn't seem to fit at all. Well, I suppose if I could make sense out of it then there would be no incentive at all to finish my time machine.

Very true, but this seems to be one of the things I just can't wrap my head around. Not that it matters.

So what is the universe expanding into? And where is it expanding from?

The former is a given, so I don't see how anyone's "missing" it. And I'm baffled as to how The Big Bang did not happen at a more-or-less specific location. If it happened everywhere, it didn't bang. I thought the point was that the universe originated from an extremely dense and hot state. "Dense" implies to me it occupied a (relatively) small location. Want to elaborate?

That's because we are inside it, rather than looking at the explosion from the outside. Everywhere was the single point. Well, maybe. The laws of physics we know are very likely to break down when you get close to a singularity.

Not to say those aren't intreaguing questions, but they're metaphysical questions rather than physical. Physically, the universe is not expanding "into" anything and not "from" anything - there is nothing outside the universe, or rather, if there was, it would make no difference since there is no way to communicate with what the universe would be expanding into if it were expanding into it (because you could only do that by transferring information faster than light, which you cannot).

Missing as in "not taking into consideration" in the line of reasoning.

Well, I suppose it depends on wether you believe that we occupy a special location in space time. From our perspective, the universe is expanding away from us in all directions. That either means we're exactly at the centre of the universe, or (if you beleive the universe looks more or less the same wherever you are), every point in space is moving away from every other point.
Imagine you had a ball of dough with raisins in it (you can imagine it as being infinitely small if you want). Place it in the oven and the dough will rise (expand). Using the raisins as your fixed markers, you will see that they are all moving away from one another. Now, did the expansion of teh bread begin at a pecific location? No, it started everywhere at once (more or less).
The analogy is crude and flawed, but it brings the basic idea across.

Not in the sense of the type of explosion you'd see on Earth, no. The name "big bang" is catchy and captures the imagination, but it's an analogy, not an accurate description of what happened.

The intuitive picture is not easy; the mathematical one in a sense is easier.
It didn't occupy a location, because all of space was compressed together. The normal way to think about this is to look from the outside in and see the explosion go off at a particular location before your mind's eye. But that's not what's happening, since we are inside and see space expanding away from us in all directions.
The mathematical description assigns the spatial coordinates of the universe a "scale factor" (say R) by which all distances are scaled (so coordinates (x y z) would be scaled (Rx Ry Rz). This scale factor changes with time: at the big bang it was 0 (so the universe occupied a single point) while for later times it is non-zero and increasing with time. So all distances scale and become larger with time.
Well, almost all of them. The size of atoms (the Bohrradius), the de Broglie wavelengths or the wavelength of transitions in atomic spectra (for instance) are not seen to scale with the universe (and a good thing for us too, because if they did the entire universe would be scale invariant and look the same now as it did 13.7 billion years ago).

Was this not a given? It sounds like semantics at this point. It was at a single location. Now it's big and spread out. Sure, "Everywhere was the single point", but it was still a single fuggin' point and you're not going to see the "singularity" in the present unless you're on the edge of the mess, even given your raisin-bread analogy.

I understand the word. I don't understand how anyone's missing it.

I still want to know what's outside of "space".

I can understand that the universe is just a scaled up version of what it was when it occupied a single point, but that still doesn't make any clearer how a picture of this single point could possibly be viewed. Unless the speed of light were scaled as well, I entirely fail to see how light from 13.7 billion light years ago which originated at much the same point as we could possibly still be behind us (relatively speaking, of course) considering that light should not (to the best of my knowledge) apply to the scale.

The land before time

I'll steal an analogy from Hawking and say: Asking what's "outside of space" or "before time" (or for that matter, before the Big Bang) is like asking what's north of the North Pole.

Olbers' paradox.

Hubble's law.