“Time” is to me one of the most misunderstood concepts there is. I put a lot of this blame at the feet of fiction, hollywood, religious teachings etc.
Time is simply the measurement of “activity” compared against it self.
Think about the atomic clock used by NIST in Boulder Colorado. The “most accurate” time keeping device in the world, it is “accurate” simply because it is highly “consistent.” In this case a single aluminum ion trapped in magnetic field that reacts to ultraviolet light. They measure the reaction of the lasers light wave, to count out time in a highly consistent manner, then compare all other “actions” to that.
Like the meter or kilometer is to measuring of distance. Can you go a “negative” kilometer? No of course not.
When people assert “before time and space” what they are really asserting is that there was absolutely “nothing” happening, (no activity,) before the big bang. Since there is no activity to measure, or to compare measurement with, there was no “time.”
Again what they really saying is: there was “nothing.” But most people when they say this confuse this with erroneous understanding of the word “time.”
“Before time” falls under the umbrella of “nothing,” when they say “outside space and time.” All they really are saying if they understood what they are saying, is: there was “nothing.” Just like there was no “kilometer” or any other measurement of distance, because again, distance requires “something” to compare to “something” else.
An impossible, (by definition!) assertion/claim to evidence in any way. (You cannot “evidence nothing” as that would break the commonly held definition of the word “nothing.”
However! claiming some deity existed “before time and space” actually breaks the definition of “before time and space” aka, before “nothing” if there was something before “nothing” then it is something, not nothing. By literal commonly held definitions.
Just another example of a huge contradiction that many religions love to employ, hoping peoples confusion over commonly misunderstood words hide this giant contradiction. Saying their unevidenced “god” idea existed before time and space is simply making up rules that is convenient to the people that say it, but has zero bearing on reality. And sets two different word definitions into a contradictory course where one of them must be false or word definition changed.
A bit like a bunch of 6 year old’s in recess making up random new rules as they go along in a game of tag. It is nonsensical, an alternate reality that is not useful, and quite often damaging to the understanding of actual reality.
This is also why actual “time travel” is impossible. All the fictional, Hollywood, etc depictions of time travel that I have ever seen or heard of is actually not time travel at all.
It is simply the rearranging of all atoms and atomic states and levels of energy and interaction with each other, in the entire universe, to mimic a certain point in the past or future, except for the all the trillions upon trillions of atoms in the object doing the “time travel.” (More like one object remaining unchanged while everything else was forced to change to a new state of action/interaction.)
If somehow humans or some unknown powerful deity like entity was capable of rearranging all the atoms and accompanying interactions to the universe as they see fit, it is still not time travel, it just massive transformation of the universe.
Also: with that kind of power to change the surroundings to the extent of, “time travel” and the concept of time it self would be a silly, useless endeavor.
In a rough comparison that we may be able to understand, it is like earning 100’s of trillions of dollars a second, every second you are alive, and being concerned about giving exact change at the fast food drive through.
There would be no “grandpa paradoxes,” also toss out a bunch of other sci-fi tropes around time travel too, like bad things happening if you run into a “past version of yourself.”