Tower of Babel

This morning I watched a news report on a young man who has an incredibly powerful mind and is able to memorize massively lengthy numbers (memorized Pi = 3.141592653589..... after one look) after only seeing them once and he was able to learn Icelandic, which is one of the planet's most difficult languages to learn, in only a week. One of the things mentioned in that report is that, after monitoring and testing his brain, scientists found that the different sections of his brain worked together as opposed how most brains work where the different sections of the brain work separately from each other.

In some strange way, this news report made me think of the biblical account of the Tower of Babel where, after seeing the progress man was making in technological innovation, God caused men to longer speak the same language which brought about ensuing chaos. I wonder if that is where God simply "flipped a switch" in the mind which caused it to stop working as a cohesive unit. I have often heard that scientists have calculated that we only use about 20% of the minds capacity and there is another 80% that basically remains a mystery. Maybe there was a time where man was able utilize the full 100% of the brain's capacity and God decided to dumb men down a notch or two..

So why would God do something like that? Why would God figuratively make us function with "one hand tied behind our backs"? Did He feel threatened? Was He afraid that we might build a tower to heaven and find that He was just "the man behind the curtain"? I'm pretty sure that that is not the case...so why would God purposely shut down the potential of something that He had created?

Maybe God saw where such innovation could lead when mixed with a fallen nature. What if God decided that it was too early in the history of the world for man to figure out how to make an atomic bomb? What if He clearly saw that we would, through our industry mixed with our greed, destroy our surroundings and eventually destroy ourselves long before God had deemed that time to come. Maybe He wasn't ready to watch his precious creatures die a viciously slow and painful death from cancers that were caused by chemicals and toxins that we had synthesized.

It just might be that the whole Tower of Babel incident was one more incredible act of God's mercy and kindness towards a people who were too stupid to see that they were too smart for their own good..