Dear Mark,
You are certainly right that our inability to talk with and understand each other is a key to resolving most of our problems as a human race, and that the Tower of Babel story signifies just that. Your use of the Bible as an atheist as at least on occasion, good literature is admirable, and right to your point of engaging with "the other side".
I take the other view, that the Bible tells us the truth about both worldview and good news. I do not think the Bible is infallible, it just gets worldview and good news right - in a way that nothing else does. And the Biblical story is in its main lines historically correct. I think that can be shown by the evidence of reason and fact to be the case. Being in the ranks of this group of scholars, etc., to present the Biblical case is a roller coaster experience, and lots of fun.
You say on page 2 that "it does not seem that the bulk of evil is the result of purposeless malevolence." You might take a look at www.hawaii.edu on the purposeFUL malevolence all through the 20th century, most of which was not in war time but viciously secular governments destroying their own people (Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao, et al).
I argue in my paper (How Shall We Then Live?) that it was specifically the Judeo-Christian West that began to turn around the grinding tyranny and poverty almost everywhere, and to give honor to every human being. Three things in Biblical religion did that: 1. the theme that all men are created equally in the image of God; 2. that God is sovereign over all things, including kings and other potentates (they no longer get a pass because they are big and powerful); and 3. that all human beings are bound by the law of God, to love God and to love each other just like we love ourselves. Seems to me a way of life hard to beat, and one which we will never do on our own, only with the help of God.
I trace some of the broad steps through Western history leading to the growing freedom of the lower classes, the development of a free-market of ideas leading to universities, and then to science itself. Add to that a limited government for a free people. None of that, I think, could have happened apart from the Biblical culture as it slowly found its way into modernity. It indeed produced modernity.
Then Christians betrayed themselves and God, rejecting the very science they had founded - for fear that science might disprove the Christian faith. Many Christians opposed reason to revelation, and so made Christianity irrelevant to modern culture which, then under the auspices of secularism was seeking to operate scientifically.
You point to the collapse of unity among us all, an effect of the Tower of Babel. The essential unity among the Hebrews and Christians was the moral unity generated by the law of God - Decalogue and the Two Great Commandments. People agreed on the difference between right and wrong. When moral consensus collapses, the culture collapses. No more consensus on "how things are done", or on "where are we going?" Precisely the problem of our topic.
This is a long-winded way of saying that perhaps, as the Tower of Babel story points to the problem of the human race, so God's answer to that problem might just be the real one, the restoration of His law and grace among us.
Computers can give us tons of information, but I think they are not capable, as you believe, of giving us wisdom. There is a break of kind between information and wisdom.
Best wishes, Earle