What St. Thomas speaks of there is one error that I consistently kept making when I was studying Creation on my own, namely, that sin changed the nature of lesser creatures. But it makes sense that the lion is going to eat the sheep, even before the Fall, because that is the natural order of things.

As for me, do they still make Brioschi?

Is it not the tradition of the Church that all of material creation fell with Adam's sin? Upon a simple reading of the texts, one might come away with the idea that all creatures ate herbs before the Fall. If I'm not mistaken, well-known creationist Paula Haigh held to that opinion.

If she is correct, then why the differences in the teeth of carnivores and herbivores? It's hard to conceive that the Fall of man would have caused these kinds of changes in the physical characteristics of animals. Ultimately, I think the guiding principle is that the consequence of the Fall is to throw all of material creation into disorder. The body rebels against the soul, though the soul's rightful dominion is not obliterated. And the creature rebels against man, though his rightful dominion over the earth is not obliterated.

Exactly, I agree. If some animals switched from eating only plants before the Fall (obligate herbivory) to eating meat afterwards, they would have had to change form in drastic ways. There would need to be significant changes in morphology of the teeth/jaws, digestive tract, sensory systems, metabolism etc.  They literally would need to change their nature and identity. Ultimately, this opens a big can of worms, as these changes could be of a macroevolutionary magnitude....


Ken Ham and others, while well intentioned, often cherry-pick omnivores (animals eating both plants and meat) which have "carnivore-looking" teeth such as land-based bears,  coyotes, etc. to make a drawn-out argument that ALL carnivores could have survived on plants alone before the Fall (in other words, he thinks drastic changes weren't needed).  However, many of these animals, especially those in the dog family, wouldn't do so well if you removed all the meat from their diet. And the fact that bears also eat plants in addition to meat is actually reflected in their teeth (the blunt carnassials, vs sharper ones in a more active carnivore). Therefore, their teeth are actually different from those of an obligate carnivore. 

And these examples neglect predators that by their nature feed exclusively on meat. Cats of all kinds and sizes for example are obligate carnivores. When vegans try to force their house cats to eat a vegan diet too to "save the environment" (lol), the cat inevitably becomes ill. The vast majority of raptor birds such as hawks are equipped with the talons and beaks best used for seizing/processing animal prey, and are active predators. The anatomy and behavior of snakes such as constrictors are set up for restraining, engulfing, and digesting animal prey. And while reconstructions of extinct animals are never as certain as living ones, and should be looked at with caution, it cannot be denied that many dinosaurs (T rex, Spinosaurus, Velociraptors etc.) have teeth and claws that were best used to prey on other animals. 

This becomes even more apparent in the ocean. Penguins can only feed on fish, krill, squid etc.  Dolphins, whales, porpoises, and seals feed exclusively on fish, mollusks, and crustaceans; their teeth (or baleen), GI tract, and sensory systems could only work for this kind of diet. The razor sharp teeth of most sharks and many other fish are specifically used for slashing, ripping, and cutting the flesh of animals. A deep sea anglerfish's bioluminescent lure is specifically used to entice small fish, which are then consumed by teeth only a predator could have.  Adult sea anemones and jelly fish are all based on the concept of trapping animals with stinging cells, and then feeding on them. 

Parasites are another good example. Something like a tapeworm or roundworm relies on the animal it infests, and really can only do that. In fact, tapeworms are so dependent on their hosts, they don't even have a digestive tract; they just absorb nutrients they are bathed in within the host's intestines. To envision "back-engineering" a tapeworm into something that could live outside the animal host long-term and eat plants before the Fall would mean making into something different from a tapeworm; a completely different animal.

Another interesting way to look at this would be to observe the forms that animals use to defend against predators. The shell of a turtle, the quills of a porcupine, armor of an armadillo etc. are overtly defensive structures; a primary function of these is to protect against predators. If no predation/death existed prior to the Fall, the nature of these animals really doesn't make much sense.

Even on these natural levels, St. Thomas's statement that the animals' diet and "natural antipathy" didn't change at the Fall (even though their behavior towards humans did change then, creating the disorder) seems to make more and more sense.

 

I only watched a small part of it, but the atheists were tough to listen to because they were just throwing out words (assuming that they were real and proven things), so they were trying to just flood their various spiels with tons of terms, etc. ... but weren't debating the core issues.  That's actually an obnoxious technique that injected itself into High School and College debate, where the tendency of the judges was to award the debate to the person who threw out the MOST stuff.  So you had the phenomenon of speed-talkers winning the debates, and there was never any intellectual engagement between the two sides.  These teams would walk in with literal file cabinets on wheels and would pull out these "evidence" cards, which were just quotes, and the judge awarded each point to the team that produced (i.e. read) the most "evidence" cards for each point, and then the team that won the most points was awarded the debate, and the core intellectual disagreements were lost in the noise.  It got to the point of absurdity.  So the speed-talkers that could rip through the most cards along with the teams that had the biggest file cabinets invariably won, even if they engaged in no rational discussion whatsoever.  In the final rebuttal, teams would go through an outline of the points and say stuff like, "I.A.1 -- we: 4 cards, they 2 cards -- we win that point", and just go through the list.  So I switched over to Lincoln-Douglas debate format, hoping it would be different, and it was a little better, but the same nonsense.  Only difference with Lincoln-Douglas is that you debated by yourself and there were rounds where the topic was unknown ahead of time.  Yet people still found a way to bring in their file cabinets and go in the same direction there.

So in last night's debate, after they rattled off 30 things in two minutes, you would lose the point if you couldn't refute each an every one of them in the time you had.  And it's not possible to do any of it justice.  It was obvious to me that the atheists came from this absurd and sophistic debate background (High School and college debate), as I was in those circles for years before I got sick of it and quit.  What it had turned into was neither enjoyable nor worth my time.  At one point, I was on a team with a single partner, and we both agreed to walk in cold with ZERO evidence cards for any given debate.  We did nothing but argue from either memory or using our brains.  LOL ... we actually won a tournament unexpectedly, much to our surprise, since it appeared that the venue we were at had also become sick of the old "evidence card" speed-reading crap.

So literally this then:


I had a debate class in college, and I vaguely remember it did not operate on that basis, but was more formal.