Is the Eternal imperative? I just had an interesting conversation at Ask The Atheist: http://asktheatheist.com/?p=1860 

Essentially, I asked: Do atheists believe that everything came from nothingness or do they believe that something has always been?

The conclusion of the conversation was that there is an eternal imperative and that the eternal imperative is likely extra-dimensional. 

This line of reason I am told is an old argument, is this in fact so and in light of new Scientific evidence that supports a divine creator; is this line of thought being advanced within Christianity today?
The idea you are referencing - that God started everything from nothing - is called creation ex nihilo.  It is by far the most common Christian understanding of how the world came to be.

In Genesis, the first words we have say that:


  In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. 2 Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. 3 And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.


This presupposes that there was nothing, then God acted, and then there was something.  This is not altogether unlike the Big Bang, in which there was {nothing | nothing that bears any resemblance to our world}, and then something happened, and there was the universe.

The term eternal imperative is not one with which I am familiar, but Aquinas' cosmological argument and more specifically the argument from contingency may be what you are referring to.  

While rarely the first argument we turn to, it hasn't necessarily been rejected. The very simplistic idea is that because things exist, there had to be a thing that caused them to exist, necessarily proving God.  The "First Cause" argument is still relatively popular.

You will note, however, that the argument itself is not contingent on science - it is derived theologically, using methods of logic which originally came from theology and philosophy - a set of techniques that "science" later incorporated into the scientific method.