In these verses, what we have is not an indication that God lacks omnipresence or omniscience, but a choice bit of satire and irony at the expense of man. As Christian scholar John Wenham puts it: "The tower which men thought reached to heaven, God can hardly see!"

Men thought their tower was spectacular, but the writer wants us to view it as so unspectacular, puny, and irrelevant that an omnipresent God didn't notice it until He came closer. Likewise, the number of those who seek God is so small that even an omniscient God has to "look down" to find them.