Time and the universe

I'm intrigued by the "Beginning" of the universe. The word immediately promote questions: was there a beginning, in the scientific sense? what was it like? The problem is that "beginning" implies a moment that is the start of something: before it was not, and after it was. But in the case of the universe there was no beginning, only an after. In this sense, this 'beginning' is timeless: time comes after it. 
But could this be said of the universe as a whole? The universe is a four-dimensional extension, permeated by a kind of weft that sets a limit, namely the speed of light, on the shapes within it. Time is not an absolute, but a human convention. 

[Addition after finding an alternative]  

There's an alternative to this in the ideas of Ahmed Farag Ali and Saurya Das ("Cosmology from quantum potential." Physics Letters B. Volume 741, 4 February 2015, Pages 276–279 - see https://phys.org/news/2015-02-big-quantum-equation-universe.html#jCp)

It rests on a non-standard approach to quantum theory due to Bohm - but I feel that we still have no fully consistent approach to applying quantum theory on a large scale.
At the core of this is the fact that we still have no universal approach to physics, encompassing the smallest particles and the entire universe. Our physics remains a patchwork.