Science, Energy & Time

Last Sunday Ange and I where heading back to Ballarat after another all-too-short weekend at home. Ange is doing Year 12 this year, and her favourite subject is Chemistry. She's a freak, but a science freak as she doesn't mind Physics either. So we where talking about science and stuff and I came out with this statement/question

"Energy can never be created, nor destroyed right? It just changes forms. That being the case, why is there any energy at all? Why not nothing?"

I'm sure people have thought about it before. Because the same goes for matter. For energy to have never been created, it has to have always existed. If energy has always existed without being created, the Universe is of infinite age & there is no time, and the earth should've been destroyed several times over by greedy people by now. But because we can measure time something in my prior reasoning, or one of my assumptions is wrong. (Unless you don't believe in absolute truth, but that's another blog for another day.)

I believe I know the answer. As I'm sure many of you do. Is there a science law in there that I'm missing? Are there alternative explanations to the one I believe to be true?