Claim. Unification ontology is a verification theory: it confirms the deductive Theory of the Original Image by showing that God’s attributes are universally manifested in created beings, since all things were made in the human’s likeness and the human was made in God’s image.
Elaboration. Lee frames the chapter’s epistemic structure explicitly. The Theory of the Original Image is deductive — derived from Divine Principle premises about God. Ontology is inductive verification — checking whether the attributes posited of God actually appear in observable creation. If they do, the Original Image theory gains evidential weight; ontology ‘confirms, in visible terms, the attributes of the invisible God’ (ut-02-ontology-a-theory-of-being).
The load-bearing premise is the doctrine of ‘creation in likeness’: God first envisioned the image of the human being (which resembles God), then formed the ideas of all things using the human image as prototype, citing Gen. 1:27. Because all things were created ‘according to the law of likeness,’ scientific observation of nature should converge with the attributes ascribed to God. Lee makes the stronger claim that contemporary natural science is in fact supporting the Original Image theory.
This sets up a particular apologetic posture: the natural sciences are not threats to UT but expected allies, and any apparent conflict (e.g., over the origin of life, addressed later in the chapter) is to be resolved by reframing scientific findings within the Sungsang/Hyungsang schema rather than by retreating from empirical claims. Critics (evangelical or analytic) would likely press on whether ‘verification’ is genuine when the schema is flexible enough to absorb almost any empirical finding — the same Sungsang/Hyungsang frame is applied to atoms, plants, and DNA. Worth a thread once a counter atomic exists on whether UT ontology is falsifiable.
See also. ut-creation-in-likeness-conceptual-vs-actual-order, original-image-as-divine-image-plus-divine-character, ut-human-is-microcosm-integration-of-all-things