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need to distinguish/interrelate the epistemic and ontological ways in which one can relate God and creature

Upon hearing Bill Craig report on Unbelievable about his debate with Dawkins, it seemed to me that one needs to examine carefully how on is relating God in creature in statements like:

He initially asserts that if there is no God then there is no purpose in the universe.
From which he infers, seemingly invalidly,
that if there is a God then there is purpose in the universe.

One may rescue him by saying that he means "if and only if."  Or one might say that his inference is invalid.  One may also try to find a more basic claim that justifies both of his assertions.  The latter might be doable by distinguishing the order of knowing from the order of being. 

I'll try the third.
Let's take his original claim: if there is no God then there is no purpose in the universe.
This is the contrapositive of the following: if there is purpose in the universe, then there is a God who is the source of that purpose.

This statement, I believe, correctly conveys the order of knowing or discovery: it is BECAUSE we recognize order in the universe that we are able to infer that there is a God who gives that order.
The contrapositive mentioned by Craig is really the statement that created order is ILLUSORY if there is no God.  That's Craig's point.

He then states what seems to be an invalid inference: i.e., that if there is a God then there is purpose in the universe.
This hypothetical statement conveys the order of being, or more specifically, the order of CAUSATION.
But it is misleading as stated, for the mere fact that God exists is not sufficient to imply that the universe exists at all, let alone has order.  So it would need to be restated thus:
If there is a God, then that being is the source of whatever order may exist in the universe.
Or one might try to tie it to the question of illusion:
If there is a God, then some apparent (natural) purposiveness in the universe is NOT ILLUSORY.

But this is a sketch... must develop later.

Key to what I hope to develop is how recourse to the contrast between the descriptive/explanatory approaches to understanding may come into play in articulating the above stuff.

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