P: "I do find it interesting that only since Einstein have we been thinking of space and time as a woven fabric. The bible likened it to a fabric back in the "bronze age":
actually, his analogy was more like rubber sheet, for gravity, or the expanding space of the universe as the surface of a pumping up balloon. (ask Tony, spandex becomes a bible topic only now) Isaiah 40: stretch the heavens out like a tent-". a fixed unfolding fabric, unlike the changing of size, and movement through time of the relativity equations.
P: "Some of the folks here are just having a hard time imagining an existence of any kind without time. Who says there was no time before the universe? Just because space and it's content is expanding through time at varying rates for ~14 billion earth years, getting bigger in the process, does not mean that the 4st dimension aka "time" did not exist prior to the big bang acceleration. You are confusing time with movement through time.