This has always puzzled me. If God didn’t want the fall to occur, why didn’t he, in his omnipotence, set up creation in such a way that the fall didn’t happen? He would be able to use his omniscience to see the outcomes of each possible version of his creation, so obviously he would have chosen this particular creation in the full knowledge that the fall would happen. Why? Was he unable to create Adam and Eve with both free will and the assurance that they wouldn’t fall?
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God had a greater good in store and works evil for good in the end.
Was he unable to create Adam and Eve with both free will and the assurance that they wouldn’t fall?
That’s a contradiction in terms. If they were truly free there could be no assurance of what they would choose.(outside of God’s foreknowledge which comes from his omniscience and atemporality)
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That’s not an answer.
But God does have foreknowledge, so he would have the assurance about a particular version of creation where Adam and Eve would have free will and the fall didn’t happen. Why not load that version of creation, so to speak?
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I think I would go with option No.1, de novo creation of species, on this bad boy (my pic, Royal Tyrrell Museum).
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Not a good assumption. This dangerous-looking “carnivore” skull is a Fruit Bat.
We don’t know what sort of diet theropod dinosaurs like that might have had pre-Fall, but changes could have happened on a genetic and epigenetic level after the Fall that might have had an effect of specializing the animal for carnivory in a way that it would not have been before.
Do you know there even is such a version available to load? Do you know that it would have given a better overall result, in the long run, in the final evaluation? You can’t know any of those things.
Not equivalent. Why would you think I would assume the fruit bat skull is a carnivore? The T-Rex is another matter. But do not muddy the waters, examples of obligate carnivores can be multiplied endlessly and you know this.
The point is that you cannot make assumptions based upon teeth alone. And morphology in general changes and certainly there would have been the possibility for great morphological changes after the Fall.
But you can.
I think you are the one making the assumption that “sharp teeth” = “carnivore”, not functional morphologists. Have you ever looked at the literature on the functional morphology of teeth?
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Do you think that God is incapable of making such a version? You’re basically arguing “God works in mysterious ways”, which isn’t exactly intellectually satisfying.
No, I’m saying if God’s goal is free beings, then it may be that there is no such ‘possible world’ you are suggesting. God’s omnipotence does not mean God breaks laws of logic. God constrains himself by his own logical nature; he cannot lie, for example.
Really? Then why did @RonSewell post that picture of a Trex skeleton (focused in on the jaws) in the first place? In context, that was the implication. “This bone structure could not possibly be anything other than carnivorous”. But my point is that 1) that assumption may not always hold and 2) we don’t know how much that bone structure changed as a result of the Fall.
It’s true. Those teeth are built for ripping flesh. The teeth are serrated for ripping flesh. There are no auxiliary teeth for chewing. To me that is both blatantly obvious and in keeping with mainstream science, but if you want a more expert opinion there is a world of literature at your service.
By the way, if you are ever in Alberta, please do let me know, and I would be happy to accompany you for a tour of the Royal Tyrrell museum! You will not find a better exhibit of dinosaurs anywhere.
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They could also rip fruit and plants up as well.
There are no auxiliary teeth for chewing.
That’s true, but do all foods require chewing, necessarily? What about before the Fall? What did all the plants and fruits look like? We don’t know.
Did this creature (or rather its progenitors) use to have auxiliary teeth for chewing prior the Fall, but then they were lost?
Another Albertan! I love the Royal Tyrrell. Very much looking forward to taking my son there when he is a couple years older. (He’s 2 right now.) 
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I’ll keep this in mind!
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T-Rex is just a particularly dramatic exhibit. When Adam named the scorpion, did it have a stinger? Why would a scorpion have to subdue fruit? What other use can you assign to it? How do filter feeders avoid zooplankton? There are just a lot of obligatory carnivores. Nature requires much much more than a tweaking to go from vegetarian to the predator and prey ecology we see. So yeah, a rather nasty looking post-fall second creation event.
They wouldn’t have to. They would not be ‘alive’ in the Hebrew biblical sense of being ‘nephesh chayyah’.
You are looking for loopholes. From your link
fish are regarded as nephesh creatures.
A large number of fish start out as zooplankton.
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