Well, that’d be a problem then, because science’s current understanding of the universe is that there is a “beginning” of space-time and that “now” is not meaningful.
Then I think we probably agree. If time has no beginning, then asking how much time has “passed since the beginning” is nonsense, given that there is no beginning. It’s analogous to asking how far am I from the East Pole of the Earth.
There’s more than one way to answer this. The usual way: it’s curved with respect to itself, as described by the metric tensor (mathematical object that how a coordinate system varies as a function of position in space-time). Physicists use that math to avoid introducing “metric dimensions” (my term) through which space-time could alternatively be called to curve through. But one could do use additional dimensions to describe the curvature, with the understanding that these are not actual dimensions particles can move through.