Most Christians believe the Bible teaches that God created the universe out of nothing. Aside from the fact that it’s entirely impossible to create anything out of nothing, this idea (which is a concept that is generally referred to as “creatio ex nihilo”) isn’t actually taught anywhere in Scripture anyway, so simply put, no, He didn’t. Instead, I believe that both logic and Scripture teach something else, which is that the universe was “creatio ex deo,” meaning created out of God Himself, and Romans 11:36 (which says: “seeing that out of Him and through Him and for Him is all”) backs this up.
I realize it probably sounds blasphemous to many, but the fact of the matter is that the whole universe really is made out of a “part” of God, so to speak. This doesn’t mean that we are God, however (which would be Pantheism), because the universe isn’t all there is (as would be the case under Pantheism). Instead, while a “part” of God does manifest within the physical universe, He ultimately transcends the universe at the same time (“the heavens, and the heavens of the heavens, do not contain [Him],” as 2 Chronicles 6:18 tells us). So, instead of Pantheism, I believe that Panentheism is true instead, which basically just means that God “transformed” a “part” of Himself into “universe,” meaning into space, time, and matter, and, in fact, that the whole universe exists within that “part” of God (which is also backed up by Acts 17:28, which says: “for in Him we are living and moving and are”).
In response to this, I have heard it said that, “I believe God spoke all into existence. Everything is vibrating. This sound/vibration came out of God and didn’t exist until spoken.“ And while Genesis does indeed seem to say that God “spoke” (note the quotation marks, indicating that I’m using the word figuratively) all into existence, it’s important to recognize that vibrations require something to vibrate. You can’t vibrate matter out of something that doesn’t exist, so it could only be God Himself that vibrated, if this is the case. Simply put, if He used vibrations to create the universe, He vibrated a “part” of Himself, so to speak, into “universe.”
Besides, for God to form the universe out of something called “nothing” (if that were even possible), there would have to be a “nothing” already existing “beside” Him, so to speak, before the universe existed, to form it out of. And if anything other than God existed “before” space/time/matter did, it would mean that something called “nothing” (or “nothingness”) already existed in a “universe” of its own “beside” God, since it would have always been existing outside of God, and hence would not have been created by God. In fact, it would then have had to have been created by another God (or be another God). Unless, of course, you believe that God first created something called “nothingness,” then created the universe out of that nothingness. But even then, that thing called nothingness would have had to have been created out of a “part” of Himself, so the end result would be the same, if it were actually even possible for “nothing” to exist, which it really isn’t. You see — and this is getting into the topic of ontology — for something called “nothing” to exist, it would have to already be something, and if it’s something, it’s not nothing, which means that “nothing” can’t actually exist at all, and hence there never was a “nothing” to create the universe out of. So, simply put, in the beginning there was only God to create the heavens and the earth (the universe, in other words) out of.
This also answers the question of why there is something rather than nothing as well, by the way, because, if “nothing” can’t exist, then something has to exist, and that something was originally God.