The Beginning of Time and there was no Time before Time

This is something that to me seems blatantly obvious, that time had to have had a beginning, but I so often get that it could extend backward infinitely.  I think those who insist so are afraid one is giving creationists and first causality types an opening, and maybe one is, but their stuff falls on so many other grounds there is no need to maintain an erroneous notion just to defend against them.  Aquinas was right when he said the idea of there being no beginning of time is absurd.  What he didn't understand is that it is absurd to assert that anything could be without beginning.

Now, first, I don't know what "time" is: this is an unsolved question, and tend to think of it as the illusion of past passing into future because things change and events happen, but the only thing here that really exists is the present.  Regardless, one can use the idea of time as a flowing river or something along those lines to help with understanding it.

Now let us say the doctors really get their act together and stop disease and aging, and the engineers do the same thing and stop accidents.  We will then live forever.  Well, no.  No longer how long we live it will never have been forever.  It may be a million or a billion or some unimaginable time, but never forever.  Infinity is not a countable number that way.  You never reach forever, even though you never die.

For the same reason time cannot have "always existed" as it is so easy to say.  One cannot climb out of a bottomless well.  That applies to just not us, but to existence itself.  The mistake of course is in thinking time is a sort-of beginning of the number line.  It is not.  The number line has neither beginning nor end.

So time had a beginning, maybe the Big Bang, more likely something else much earlier, who knows, but it had a beginning, and there was nothing before the beginning of time.  This is an interesting sort of nothing -- there were not eons and eons of emptiness -- that would be time -- there was nothing and then there was space-time.  It just happened.

There is a sense in which one might say time has always existed, but that "always" is necessarily finite.  The when of things can only be measured from after the first event: talk about "before" that is meaningless.

I have a notion that before time was like the space between two adjacent irrational numbers -- except you can stick an infinity of numbers between any two, so there is no space there, just as there is no time before time.