Separate, But the Same

My wife Wendy and I are adopting Katie, an infant girl from China. At the beginning of the adoption process, we were asked to lay out our Trans-racial adoption-parenting plan. You may be asking yourself the same question that we did. A What? In short, it is a plan to raise a child from one culture by a family from another culture. That got me thinking about the differences of people groups and what modern society has termed races. Where did the diversity of peoples come from and are we really that different?
Scripture records an event that helps explain the origin of people groups. It is the story of the Tower of Babel. The gathering that took place in modern day Iraq involved people that had one language and a common speech (Gen. 11:1). Noahs Flood would be a topic that all were familiar with and quite possibly all the worlds population would have been gathered there. Then, based on their pride and disobedience, God confused their language and the result was physical separation of the people.
The introduction of languages is key in the formation of people groups. Two important things occur here. 1)...God uses different languages to separate and scatter the people; 2)...the speakers of these different languages can instantly understand a language that they didnt speak before. Linguists estimate that a language needs about 10,000 years to develop. It doesnt seem likely that multiple languages would spontaneously appear at the same time in an evolutionary sense. With peop ...