As to your first part, after you run past the football field length line, just to get an idea, you may, indeed, come back and chat with some of these folks.

Since this is a thought experiment–what if all of your relatives were standing in that line as fertile adults. I’d bet you’d think some of the women were fetching. The incest taboo wouldn’t kick in, because you weren’t raised in the same house with most of them. This might cause you a conundrum. If you can marry a second cousin, can you marry your great great great (X20) grandmother? The shared genetic material you share with that woman would be far less than that of your second cousin. Such a potential, hypothetical conundrum!

Another interesting thing, not that it really matters, but EVERYONE reading this is part “black”.

http://www.dnaancestryproject.com/

DNA studies have shown that people shared a common ancestor who lived in Africa between 50,000 to 200,000 years ago. As our ancestors migrated out of Africa into the rest of the world, small changes called mutations occurred in their DNA. As generations passed, each mutation links our ancestor to a specific time and place in history. The mutations that we find in our own DNA tell the story of our own ancestral past.

Wouldn’t it be amazing to think that you could run along side that entire 300 foot line of ancestors in only 15 seconds (I’m assuming your not an Olympic caliber sprinter) to reach one of your ancestors who was alive 7,500 years ago?

But think even further back. Dawkins has calculated that 20,000,000 great-grandparents ago, our relatives were small shrew-like animals living at the end of the Cretaceous period. What if you spaced out your relatives one foot apart to extend all the way back to these shrew-like creatures. That line would be 3,787 miles long. That’s about the distance from my hometown of St. Louis, Missouri to Anchorage Alaska. Imagine speeding alongside that line of your relatives at 60 mph, seeing generations of your relatives wiz by, more than 5,000 of them every minute.

Biologically modern humans likely started occurring 100,000 years ago. Driving along that line of your relatives, you’d run out of biologically modern humans in 4,000 generations. That’s less than one minute driving along your line of relatives at highway speed.

If you wanted to drive all the way to your shrew-like relatives (at 60 mph), you’d drive alongside that entire 3,787 mile long line of relatives in only 63 hours. Only 63 hours to get back to a relative who was literally a shrew!

You can’t possibly write a work of fiction that is more amazing than these facts.

We are all survivors. If any one of those ancestors failed to reproduce, you wouldn’t be there. Just think of how likely it was that you would never exist.

I would take you up on the barf bowl, if it helped you snap out of it. Plus I would get famous on youtube. Man eats barf to prove faith in lord jesus! Anyway, if God actually exists, it is holy barf, so more power to me. Trust me, I have worked in restaurants… barf is what you WANT to be eating when you go the restaurant.

Faith is by definition not objectively verifiable. I can’t barf faith into a bowl and watch you eat it. Others can’t watch or record faith, or post it on the internet. I don’t claim any “truth” of “mine” to be anything “more” than any others’ truths. I simply state my faith; it is for you to choose for yourself. Go with God! (or Not!).

P.S. As for “circular reasoning” and “crap”, I’ll leave that to you!

Tim, your truth is not any more truthful than mine. I believe that God does not exist, just like I believe that I am typing on a keyboard. I admit that could be wrong in both cases, God may exist, and I may not be typing this. Why are your beliefs about what you had for breakfast any different than you belief that God exists?

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/transcripts/3314_blackhol.html

“NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Even though a black hole emits no light, is completely invisible, we know exactly what effect a black hole is going to have on its environment, on the stars in its vicinity, on the gas that wanders a little too close.

So will we ever see a black hole? No. But that’s not what’s important here. What’s important here is we can see its paw print.

ANDREA GHEZ: Our view to the center of the galaxy is absolutely superb. And our ability to position stars at the center of the galaxy is like somebody in Los Angeles seeing somebody in New York be able to move their fingers, like this, okay? Just two centimeters. That’s the precision with which we can measure something that is 26,000 light years away from us.”

So what? In a universe of infinite possibilities, with an infinite number of other possible universes, can’t you admit there is some possibility of a creator?

I’ll admit the possibility there is not one, but my faith is that there is one. Maybe I’m a cosmic joke, utterly fooled by my choice of belief. I’ll admit that possibility. Some here are convinced of that as truth.

But, I believe in God in the absence of proof. I have faith. Faith does not require a slavish devotion to some others’ ideas of how the universe in its infiniteness came into being. I believe that when we look out into the universe and see the “dark” matter and energy, perhaps we look upon the act of creation and into the eyes of God.

I actually stumbled upon that article while investigating the sixth great extinction that Vicki mentioned. For supposedly being God’s creatures, we sure are managing to make a gigantic mess out of his planet.

You mentioned the Garden of Eden…you and Tim might both enjoy an essay I wrote about it a while ago:
http://dangerousintersection.org/?p=166/. If Christians are going to credit their god with the creation of the universe, then they should also make him responsible for screwing up so badly.