Problems with select version

Sorry to bother you but I was unable to find this problem after looking
through the mailing list. I have postgres setup up on UNIX and I
configured the appropriate files and followed the steps from the manual.
After I initialized the database server and started the postmaster I
attempted to query template1 for the version number. Every time I run
select version(); I get 0 rows returned. I also ran the query select *
from pg_database which returned no rows, shouldn't template1 at least be
in there? Did I miss a step, or is there any way to initialize these
values. I am attempting to connect to this database using pgAdmin 3 but
the select version() is failing because template1 is returning no rows.
Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Adam