The Scattering of Shinar

Genesis 11:1-9
"Once the whole world spoke a single language and used the same words.
As men journeyed in the east, they came upon a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there.
They said to one another, "Come, let us make bricks and bake them hard"; they used bricks for stone and bitumen for mortar.
"Come", they said, "let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and make a name for ourselves; or we shall be dispersed all over the earth.
Then the Lord came down to see the city and tower which mortal men had built,
And he said "Here they are, one people with a single language, and now they have started to do this henceforth nothing they have a mind to do will be beyond their reach.
Come let us go down there and confuse their speech, so that they will not understand what they say to one another."
So the Lord dispersed them from there all over the earth, and they left off building the city.
That is why it is called Babel, because the Lord there made a babble of the language of all the world; from that place the Lord scattered men all over the face of the earth."

To me this passage about the scattering of Shinar encapsulates the two important questions about the Bible:

1) Is the Bible true?
2) Does the God of the Bible merit our worship?

Let's take the second question first as it is in fact the least important: after all if the Bible isn't true then the God described in it doesn't exist in the first place. To take this particular passage, God sees a functional, apparently peaceful civilization and destroys it. And it isn't just detroyed, but the people altered in such a way that they can no longer talk to each other with all the consequences of that, including conflict. God has turned something peaceful and well ordered into immediate chaos and a recipe for future conflict. For me this is not the act of a deity worthy of adoration.

And one has to ask why, if it is true, he even bothered, as our civilization today has far surpassed any feat of tower building that would have been available to this apparent civilization in Shinar. It's clear that they couldn't have built to the heavens, even we can't do that yet, although we can send the odd spacecraft there now and then. And so we come to the second question of the truth of the Bible. It's clear that the Tower of Shinar was no threat to God and that someone as supposedly omnipotent as he is could block any physical threat to the heavens at any point. Perhaps he was pre-empting a threat from us down the road, but that begs the question as to why no similar action has happened since. And why should a such a powerful deity be physically threatened by us in any case? The whole story is just not consistent and on its own merits alone leans strongly against the literal truth of the Bible. We don't even have to invoke the science, which provides much contradictory evidence both on the origins of language and humans as a whole.

Needless to say the one part that does have some truth is that we as a species are capable of almost anything when we put our minds to it, for better or for worse. And whilst the worse has at times been horrific, taken across human history as a whole, we have moved things to the better.