Seeing as how the matter contained within the big bang is now spread out throughout the universe that argument is a non-starter. You'd have to go back in time for there to be infinite gravity and mass at the point in the universe where the singularity was.

Right, but the further back you go in time, the closer all the matter in the universe gets to each other, which increases the gravitational forces, so again, as I was saying, time would be stretched. So if you want to view time in the way many people do, then it would technically extend infinitely in the negative direction as you approach the big bang, asymptotically as time gets stretched thinner and thinner the closer you get. So you would never quite reach "t=0" as you keep mentioning, just as you would also never quite reach infinite gravitational forces either, but just get closer and closer asymptotically.

Anyways - thanks for the chat. I thought we were discussing conventional big bang cosmology and not fringe hypotheses. Those don't hold much interest for me.

The problem is the conventional way to think about it doesn't exactly hold up either. If you want to say the big bang created time, then you can't define when the big bang happened. We define it using the reference of time as we experience it. Therefore we're defining time as an abstract axis that doesn't exactly work with our understanding of the fabric of timespace. It's more of an outside reference point than a physical thing. The concept of time we use for that definition and the fabric of time in timespace are therefore being defined differently. Here's a diagram that kind of explains what I'm saying:

http://i.imgur.com/c6PgCcz.png

Imagine the scale as the numbers you see * 10 million, so 1380 = 13.8 billion years

We experience time fairly linearly at the moment, so we can define time as a matter of years, etc. But when we define units of time, that's in relation to our current experience. If you change the frame of reference to one where gravitational forces are different, those units of time would measure differently to an outside observer, hence time dilation. The chart shows how an observer under the direct influence of the gravitational forces would experience time (the orange line). As you can see, as we approach what we define to be t=0, the observer has already experienced more than 80 billion years, and if we got closer to the t=0 line, that number would grow exponentially higher, never ending as you travel further back in time. You're simply getting closer and closer to the outside reference point of t=0, but never quite reaching it. T=0 assumes a linear dimension of time, but the gravitational forces of the big bang would prevent that from being possible.

Note that the equation I used was just a simple logarithmic equation, as I don't have the number necessary to compute the exact effect of gravity over time, but it would have the same effect, just a different "slope". The line may simply get flatter sooner.