Babel

Now the whole world had one language and a common speech. As people moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar and settled there.
They said to each other, "Come, let's make bricks and bake them thoroughly." They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar. Then they said, "Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth."
But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower the people were building. The Lord said, "If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other."
So the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. That is why it was called Babel — because there the Lord confused the language of the whole world. From there the Lord scattered them over the face of the whole earth.
Genesis 11:1-9 (NIV)

A superficial reading of this passage leads one to consider this to simply be a description of the origin of languages. But I think there is something far more profound going on here. There are actually two things happening. First, God had told Noah and his sons to multiply and spread out over the earth (Gen 9:7). But instead of spreading out over the earth, men decided to stay in one place. It was important for humans to spread widely to the sake of the species. Having all humans in one place provided the possibility of the entire race being wiped out by natural disaster or disease.

The second thing happening here is that God is preventing mankind from working to accomplish their goals. But merely changing people's language hardly seems likely to prevent mankind from achieving his goals. The flood had only happened about 100 years previously, so the population at this point had all come from a single family speaking a common language a century before. Thus starting with any given single family speaking the same language immediately after the tower of Babel incident, in only 100 more years there would be a like number of humans speaking that same language. At most, God would have only delayed mankind's efforts for about a century. It strikes me as unlikely that such a unique, direct, and major action by God would accomplish no more than a one century delay in mankind's efforts (and the language of the passage does not allow for such an interpretation of God's intentions). Therefore, it appears that something more than merely changing languages had happened. But what?

Study after study over the years have determined that language and the way we think are correlated. Language affects how we think, and how we think affects our language. So, in addition to changing people's languages, the way they thought was also altered. In other words, not only was their language confused, their thinking was as well. Prior to this, I think people's minds still had the capabilities they had been created with back in the garden of Eden. Their mental capacity was probably far beyond what today's geniuses possess. But at that point, I believe that humankind's thinking was severely reduced. This was doubtless a mercy from God. Can you imagine if all the warlords of the past 4,000 years had developed nuclear weapons?

So, I conclude that not only were people scattered across the lands, but their mental capacity had been reduced such that "nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them" was no longer the case. I believe we will still operate under these reduced capabilities even with all of our technological advancements. We remain under the effects of God's action at Babel even now.

The preceeding seems pretty obvious, however let me suggest an additional theory. It is possible that as God split people into different languages, He also split their modes of thinking. That is, each new language group had only some facet of the original mental capacity originally held in common. Whereas before, humans all thought in all the mental modes they had originally had, but afterwards they were only able to think in much reduced ways - each group having some different facet of the original wholistic thought processes. If true, this would also explain the importance in the Book of Revelation of having people from every tongue, tribe, and nation in heaven. Part of Jesus' restoration of all things involves once again uniting all the modes of thinking, that had been split into different groups, back to the wholistic mental capabilities such that our thinking is no longer confused. That is, saved humankind would be restored to our original created capacities (if not moreso). So representatives of each of the shattered facets of mental modes will come together where we will be reunited and restored to wholeness. Something to consider.