Julian Barbour has what I consider to be a pretty well-reasoned notion a timeless universe composed of a large number of mathematical configuration spaces he calls "nows" -- i.e., it contains many states, but no objective notion of time -- outlined in his pop-sci book "The End of Time" [1999] and his website http://platonia.com/

p.s. for the record, Barbour is no clown, but a serious cat -- he is also the guy that wrote "Absolute or Relative Motion / the Discovery of Dynamics" which is a bedrock treatise on Machian ideas in physics