Claim. In creating the universe, God first conceptualized the complete unified human (specifically Adam and Eve with concrete individual images), then derived the conceptions of animals, plants, minerals by progressive subtraction; the actual creation then proceeded in the reverse order, from minerals up to humans.
Elaboration. Lee makes this point repeatedly across the chapter because it does essential work for UT ontology (C. Individual Image of the Individual Truth Being). The taxonomic levels biologists identify (kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species) are ‘classifications created by biologists for the sake of convenience’; God did not assemble humans by piling specific differences. He cites Divine Principle: ‘Prior to creating human beings, God created the natural world by expressing partial reflections of the internal nature and external form He had conceived for human beings’ (Divine Principle context, p. 34).
The conceptual process: God envisioned the human as a complete unitary whole with all relevant attributes — not abstract Man/Woman but specifically Adam and Eve with concrete individual images. Then by subtracting/transforming qualities He derived animals, then plants, then heavenly bodies and minerals. Within the animal stage He worked top-down from higher/complex to lower/simpler animals.
The actual creation reversed this: minerals and heavenly bodies first, then plants, animals, humans last.
This move is doing heavy theological work. (1) It blocks emergentist materialism: the appearance of accumulated complexity is real but secondary; the human was not produced by combining lower forms but rather lower forms were produced by subtracting from the human idea. (2) It grounds the dignity of the human as ‘lord of dominion’: the human is the paradigm, not the result. (3) It explains why observing nature can yield truth for humans — because nature is a derivative reflection of the human idea, not vice versa. (4) It harmonizes with Genesis ordering while neutralizing evolutionary objections. Critics in evolutionary biology will find this an unfalsifiable layering of theological order on top of empirical order.
See also. ut-layered-structure-of-sungsang-hyungsang, ut-ontology-confirms-original-image, ut-human-is-microcosm-integration-of-all-things