Before God created light was he in darkness?

The strange idea that God was once “in darkness” could be arrived at from an interpretation of Genesis 1 that paraphrases it as literally meaning: “about 6000 years ago there was nothing in the universe so it was dark and empty, but one day God said, “Let there be light”.

I see problems with this interpretation:

1. It is difficult to match with a similiarly literal interpretaion of Gen 2. I recently discussed this in Did it rain before the flood?
2. It leads to the bizarre idea that God may have once been “in darkness”
3. Observations of stars in the sky have shown that light is very much older (by billions of years) than 6000 years, so whatever is the correct understanding of Gen 1, this is not it.

Modern scientific views on cosmology suggest that it may not even be meaningful to speak of a time “before” light because not only light but time itself may have commenced at the start of the universe which is currently estimated as 13.7 billion years ago. Perhaps future generations will have a different concept because, like all areas of science, cosmology will certainly be revised as more is discovered. However any such revision cannot overturn overwhelming evidence that the sun and stars are very much older than 6000 years.