That's a more productive approach. It might be that time and space are not instinctive at all. Until Mersenne they were hardly known at all. Even in the Bible, to get an idea of how these things were thought of, time was not linear but cyclical, and in popular thought Persephone was kidnapped every year.
According to the Bible, time had a definite beginning, and will have a definite ending. As for more secular, down-to-earth thinking, it's true that some ancient historians had a cyclical theory of history, but that doesn't mean they thought the exact same events would be happening over and over again.
Besides, even a "cyclical" view of time is markedly different from the view that everything happens all at once.