Introduction

Fine-tuning refers to the fact that several very fundamental properties of the cosmos appear to be delicately balanced such that it is possible for life to exist. In a hypothetical universe where these properties are changed, in some cases only slightly, it is very difficult—indeed, probably impossible—to envisage how living organisms of any type could exist. These striking coincidences that enabled the emergence of life are often used in arguments for why the universe must have a divine Creator: in brief, the fine-tuning is construed as the result of a purposeful choice of an intelligence that is identified with God. Unsurprisingly, this sort of argument is not without its difficulties, and there are naturalistic counter proposals to explain the fine-tuning. My goal in this article is not, however, to dwell on the technical merits of probabilistic arguments for God based on fine-tuning but rather to look more deeply at the metaphysics of fine-tuning per se as a clue for how it might be related to the Abrahamic doctrine of creation. I propose that fine-tuning provides a compelling entry point to the classical analogy of being by which the created order gestures towards God.

To reach this point, I begin with a brief review of the fine-tuning phenomenon and how it has been leveraged to argue for a Creator. I then proceed to describe some of the difficulties with establishing the exact degree of fine-tuning together with its possible naturalistic explanations that have ramifications for a probability-based argument for God. I also explain how this sort of theistic argument, which leans on empirical observations, may be in tension with traditional philosophical approaches to God, as represented by Thomas Aquinas. The probabilistic approach runs the risk of being, in the language of Kathryn Tanner (1988, 46), “not radical enough.” To explore how fine-tuning might better be related to theology, I first analyze how fine-tuned cosmic properties fit into empirical science itself using the distinction between “classical” and “statistical” investigations proposed by Bernard Lonergan. This allows me to, finally, relate fine-tuning to Erich Przywara’s notions of creaturely actuality and arrive at the analogy of being.

The Phenomenon of Cosmic Fine-Tuning

Today, we have a remarkably good understanding of how the universe has expanded and evolved over its fourteen-billion-year history. One of the most important empirical tools we have for this is the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the glow of the primordial material of the universe that was emitted about 400,000 years after the Big Bang. This was very early on in cosmic history, when the universe was only 0.003% of its present age. There were no stars or galaxies, just a hot gas of roughly 3,000°C, that was glowing as any hot material does. We literally see that glow, but in microwaves rather than visible light because its wavelength has been stretched by a factor of around 1,000 due to the expansion of the universe. The glowing gas was the material that collapsed into stars hundreds of millions of years later, but in this primordial epoch, it was almost perfectly smooth everywhere, with variations in its density typically being only one part in 100,000. (To get a sense of scale, that is roughly how much a loud machine causes the density of air to oscillate. You need a very sensitive instrument, like your eardrum, to detect these tiny changes in pressure.) Still, these variations in density were extremely important, because where the universe was slightly more dense, there was slightly more gravity, allowing that region to attract the surrounding material so that eventually stars and galaxies would form hundreds of millions of years later. We often call these the seeds of structure because they were the initial conditions for the rich distribution of stars and galaxies today.

Now, there are a few aspects of this situation that appear fine-tuned. First, the average density of the universe—the average density around which you have these part-in-100,000 variations—is quite special. If it had been larger, the force of gravity would have caused the whole universe to stop expanding very early on, and it would have collapsed in on itself. For instance, if the universe had been just 1% denser one second after the Big Bang, it would have collapsed, effectively coming to an end, less than seven minutes later. On the other hand, if it had been a bit smaller, the reduced gravitational attraction would have allowed the universe to expand much more quickly, making it far too diffuse for stars, or any sort of complex structure, to ever form. To have a universe that lasts as long as ours, the initial density had to be extremely fine-tuned.

Second, it is surprising that the density of the universe was the same everywhere to a part in 100,000. That may not seem strange, because intuitively one expects that any gas in a volume would be spread out evenly. However, it takes time for a gas to even out. When we observe the CMB, we are looking at a volume of the universe that was roughly 100 million light years across, but the universe was only 400,000 years old, and the maximum distance light could have traveled in this time was only about one million light years, or a hundred times smaller than the span of the total volume. (The reason light would have traveled a million rather than 400,000 light years is that space was stretching the whole time.) Now, nothing can move through space faster than the speed of light. That means there was not enough time for the density at one end of the volume to smooth out across to the other end of the volume—it was more than 100 times too far away for it to have had causal contact with that region. On this reckoning, the CMB we observe contains roughly 10,000 independent regions that were never in causal contact with each other. That implies that at the beginning of the universe, somehow these 10,000 different locations started out with almost exactly the same density. There is no a priori reason this coincidence should obtain.

Third, the amplitude of the tiny, part-in-100,000 variations in this average density also appears fine-tuned. If the variations had been too small, they would not have had sufficient gravity to pull enough matter together to make stars or similar structures: the expansion of the universe would have won out against their gravity, and we just would have had a universe filled with uninteresting, diffuse gas. If they had been larger, the universe would have produced too many stars. The stars would have been so crowded that any planet would have gotten knocked out of orbit around its star by other nearby stars, making its surface conditions too unstable for life to evolve (Adams 2019, §6.2). And if the density variations had been even larger, the gas would have collapsed into black holes near the beginning of the universe, and we would not have had any stars or planets at all. Thus, the size of density variations in our universe was in a sweet spot: not too big or too small.

In addition to these global properties of the universe, there are many other examples of fine-tuning in how the universe operates. For instance, stars require a balance between the force of gravity, which pushes everything towards the core of the star, and the outward pressure produced by the energy generated by nuclear fusion in the core. If nuclear reactions were too weak, there would not be enough energy for the star to even turn on and produce the outward pressure, but if they were too strong, the pressure would be so great that the star would just explode. It turns out that in our universe, the strength of gravity, the strength of the electric force, and the masses of electrons and protons all happen to have values that make this balance inside stars possible. Furthermore, it is not only the existence of stars that hinges on these particular parameters. Figure 1, reproduced from Barnes (2012), shows some other key properties of our universe that depend sensitively on these parameters, with the strength of the electric force on the x-axis and the ratio of the electron and proton masses on the y-axis. The diagram invites us to imagine how nature would behave if the electric force and the electron and proton masses had different values than they actually do. The actual values are shown with a cross near the bottom left of the graph, and the different colored regions show how radically different nature would be if the values were different. Region 7 (yellow) has to do with the stability of stars just mentioned: in this region, stars cannot exist because the balance between the nuclear reactions and gravity does not obtain. Region 4 (pink) is where complex molecules cannot form because atoms do not stick together strongly enough. In this case, the sorts of substances required for biology could never form. In region 1 (purple), not even the simplest element, hydrogen, could exist, so there would be no water (among other things). Each of the other colored regions shows a different catastrophic outcome. Only the small white region in the lower left of the diagram produces a universe with stars, water, and the elements of the periodic table required to make complex structures for life. The strength of the electric force needs to be quite small, and the electron needs to be more than 100 times lighter than the proton.

Figure 1

An example of fine-tuning for two physical parameters: the ratio of the electron to proton mass (y-axis) and the strength of the electric force, α (x-axis). The true values of these parameters, as measured in our universe, are indicated by the cross (with an arrow pointing to it) near the bottom left of the graph. The white region in which the cross lies shows which combination of parameters would allow the universe to behave in such a way that life could still exist. The colored regions are where the parameters cause at least one difference in how the cosmos behaves that would be catastrophic for life. Graphic taken from Figure 6 (left panel) of Luke A. Barnes’s (2012) “The Fine-Tuning of the Universe for Intelligent Life.” © Cambridge University Press reproduced with permission.

Figure 1 shows only two parameters that one can imagine changing, one on each axis. Altogether, there are about a dozen such parameters (e.g., Adams 2019, Table 2); moreover, there are lots of different physical properties and processes that depend sensitively on their values. If it were possible to make a graph that had not only two axes in two dimensions, like Figure 1, but a dozen axes in a dozen dimensions to represent each parameter that is possible to vary, then you would still find only an extremely tiny white region where the parameters allow for a universe capable of having stars, complex molecules, and stable conditions. Furthermore, there are a number of other properties of our universe that appear “selected” for life. To give just one example, we live in three spatial dimensions. There is no clear a priori reason why there could not be a different number of dimensions, but three dimensions appears to be the only configuration conducive to life. For instance, if there were more spatial dimensions, the orbits of planets around stars would not be stable.

A comprehensive exposition of all the known instances of fine-tuning in our cosmos is far beyond the scope of this article, and I have only scratched the surface. Detailed scientific reviews of the subject can be found in Barnes (2012) and Fred C. Adams (2019), and an excellent popular overview is provided by Geraint F. Lewis and Barnes (2016). However, the examples I have sketched should be sufficient to convey the basic point, so I shall continue on to discuss the metaphysical implications.

The Probabilistic Fine-Tuning Argument for God and Its Technical Difficulties

Fine-tuning makes the universe appear very special. The universe had just the right conditions after the Big Bang to grow into a cosmos suitable for complex structures to form, and it has constants of nature and other fundamental physical properties that seem to fall right in the sweet spot that make life possible. It should be stressed that many of the parameters involved in fine-tuning, such as the masses of particles or the strengths of forces, are not fixed by any known theory. There is nothing in our knowledge of physics that says the proton must be 1836.15 times more massive than the electron. This ratio is a value we know only empirically, and the fine-tuning question arises because it is unclear why it and other fine-tuned parameters obtain in nature. But the fact that these particular values exist has been proposed as evidence for God, since it seems far more probable that fine-tuning is the result of a rational, purposeful choice of the Divinity rather than a fluke (see Simon 2021 for a review).

Probably the most familiar articulation of this sort of argument came from William Paley in the early nineteenth century. His analogy to someone coming across a watch lying in a field is well known:

[W]hen we come to inspect the watch, we perceive . . . that its several parts are framed and put together for a purpose, e.g., that they are so formed and adjusted as to produce motion . . . that, if the different parts had been differently shaped from what they are, of a different size from what they are, or placed after any other manner, or in any other order, than that in which they are placed, either no motion at all would have been carried on in the machine, or none which would have answered the use that is now served by it. (Paley 2006, 7)

He considers this “invincible” evidence that the watch was deliberately created by a watchmaker (Paley 2006, 15), and, by analogy, the many instances of apparent design in the natural world are proof of an intelligent Creator. It is not difficult to understand why the fine-tuning discovered by modern physics and astronomy is seen by some as compelling evidence for the watchmaker argument. However, there is historical precedent for worrying about this line of reasoning. Paley’s work leaned heavily on biological examples of the intricacy of living creatures, but then Darwin appeared on the scene and provided another explanation. We should ask whether something similar could happen with cosmic fine-tuning, and in fact, there is reason to take a closer look at just how improbable it really is. Let me raise three issues the Paley-style design argument must confront when it is applied to fine-tuning.

Probabilistic Fine-Tuning Arguments and the Theological Tradition

The potential problem with probabilistic theistic arguments is their dependence on the results of empirical science. This places them in tension with the theological tradition that avoids treating God as the object of empirical investigation. The absolute transcendence of God is one of the cornerstones of Abrahamic theologies, which tend to insist that the apophatic approach to God never be far from view. In Western Christianity, this was most famously articulated by the Fourth Lateran Council (1215): “For between Creator and creature no similitude can be expressed without implying a greater dissimilitude” (Denzinger 2010, 806). In other words, any framework used to talk about God must immediately be qualified as inadequate. Even though there may be true analogies for talking about God, the “similitude” the analogy expresses will always be outweighed by its “dissimilitude.” God’s act of creation is no exception.

We can take Thomas Aquinas, who lived soon after Lateran IV, as our representative of this tradition. Aquinas is careful not to confuse God’s act of creation with the sort of creation that occurs in the regular course of nature (as when, for instance, a tree is created from an acorn, or a star is created from a cloud of dust). He goes so far as to consider them equivocal: “[T]he universal production of being by God is neither motion nor mutation, but a certain simple emanation. And so ‘to become’ and ‘to make’ are used equivocally in reference to this universal production of things and in reference to other productions” (Aquinas 1963, Book VIII, Lect. 2, 974). By “motion” and “mutation” here, one should understand the sorts of physical processes that are studied by the empirical sciences. Aquinas is emphatically denying that God’s act of creation is of this sort.

The potential danger, therefore, with arguing that God is the most probable explanation of fine-tuning is that it treats of God as at the same level as the empirical world. Even if someone making this argument frames God as being apart from the universe in some way, God remains one option to be weighed against other options, and there is the risk that his transcendence is lost. Indeed, as Kathryn Tanner (1988, 46) has persuasively argued, if God is the Creator of everything as proposed by the Abrahamic traditions—if he is “the immediate source of being of every sort”—then his transcendence must be thoroughgoing and absolute. This sits in possible tension with the notion that he is more likely than another cause, for even if he is overwhelmingly more likely, he is still being conceived of in contrast to other possible causes. As Tanner (1988, 45) puts it: “Divinity characterized in terms of a direct contrast with certain sorts of being or with the world of non-divine being as a whole is brought down to the level of the world and the beings within it in virtue of that very opposition: God becomes one being among others within a single order.” Thus, probabilistic design arguments may not go deep enough to fully arrive at the Abrahamic notion of God—nor the conceptions of the Divine found in other major religious traditions (see Hart 2013, 27ff).

A consideration of the phenomenon of miracles can elucidate this point. It is beyond the scope of this article to rigorously define or analyze miracles, but a good working definition is that miracles are phenomena that exceed or subvert nature’s regular course so as to demand a supernatural explanation (e.g., Aquinas 1912–36, I.110.4). Probabilistic fine-tuning arguments operate in a similar spirit, since their claim is that nature per se is not an adequate explanation for the conjunction of parameters necessary for a life-friendly universe. However, it is noteworthy that traditional demonstrations for God’s existence and about his attributes tend to be based on metaphysical arguments rather than appeals to miraculous phenomena. In the first part of Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae, which deals with God and the created order in general, including his famous five proofs for God’s existence in Question 2 and his treatise on creation in questions 44–47, miracles are only considered in any detail in a few articles towards the end, comprising a minuscule fraction of the total text.² For Aquinas, miracles play an epistemic role that is posterior to the question of God. God is knowable in a general way through “natural reason,” whereas miracles are a “gratuitous grace” that aid the “supernatural knowledge”—i.e., faith—relevant for salvation (1912–36, II–II.178.1). Aquinas tends, therefore, to speak of miracles as “for confirming faith [ad fidei confirmationem]” (e.g., Aquinas 1888, II–II.178.1, ad 5; 1965, VI.2, arg 9) and “for showing [ad ostendendum]” or “for manifesting [ad manifestandum/manifestationem]” God’s power and presence (e.g., Aquinas 1888, III.43.1,3,4; 1961, III.9.10; 1965, VI.1, ad 4) rather than providing demonstrations of his existence in the strict sense.³ This may help explain why probabilistic fine-tuning arguments do not have universal appeal. Those who accept that there is a God may find fine-tuning a powerful confirmation and an aid to faith, but it is not always sufficient to convince others. As Aquinas (1912–36, I.110.4) himself points out, it is possible for us to mistakenly call something a miracle if we do not fully understand how nature works, and this is precisely the sort of counterargument that can be made against probabilistic fine-tuning arguments, as seen earlier.

Furthermore, as explained earlier, God’s act of creation is not a physical process and thus not empirically accessible. It therefore falls outside the category of the miraculous, since by definition miracles are always understood with reference to nature, and the act of creation is the ground of nature rather than an operation within nature (Aquinas 1912–36, I.105.7, ad 1). To put it another way, the God–world relation, which is what the Abrahamic doctrine of creation articulates, is metaphysically prior to anything natural sciences can investigate. Of course, this does not mean there might not be miracle-like clues, such as fine-tuning, within nature that point to a reality that transcends nature. I am not claiming that probabilistic analyses of fine-tuning are a theological dead end—after all, miracles can be compelling signs in aid of religious faith, as Aquinas certainly thinks and the broader Catholic tradition affirms⁴—but rather that they would not provide direct access to the work of creation per se.

Moreover, probabilistic design arguments are not the only option. Aquinas is sometimes credited with including an argument from design among his “five ways” for demonstrating God’s existence (e.g., Ratzsch and Koperski 2022, §2), but it is quite different from Paley’s:

The fifth way is obtained from the governance of things. For we see that certain things that lack cognizance—namely, physical bodies—act for an end. This is evident from the fact that they always or very frequently act in the same way, such that they attain that which is best. It clearly follows that they arrive at this end not by chance but by an intention. For things that do not have cognizance do not tend to an end unless directed by something that is cognizant and intelligent, like an arrow from an archer. Thus there is something intelligent by which all physical things are ordered to an end, and we call this God. (Aquinas 1888, I.2.3)

Aquinas’s approach is almost the opposite of Paley’s: rather than appealing to the improbability of the world’s constitution, it relies on the regularity of the laws of nature and the fact that physical processes operate in intelligible ways with determinate ends. Now, although fine-tuning appears necessary for our universe to be the way it is, in isolation, fine-tuning does not establish that laws of nature are regular or intelligible. It may be the result of regular laws of nature, and it may be part of a larger process that produces a life-friendly universe, but in and of itself, fine-tuning is just a set of facts. It is not clear whether fine-tuning is even relevant to an argument like Aquinas’s, which is about the general intelligibility of natural processes, not a particular set of facts.⁵

Still, the laws of nature are discovered by empirically studying particular sets of facts, so we should ask whether there is a relationship between the fine-tuning of physical parameters (used for Paleyesque arguments) and the regularity of nature (used for the Thomistic approach). Here, we can benefit from the analysis of the twentieth-century Jesuit philosopher Bernard Lonergan.

Fine-Tuning and Emergent Probability

Lonergan (1992, 102ff and 126ff) noted there are two complementary ways to find intelligibility in nature. The first is via laws that use mathematical formulas to describe how the world regularly behaves, like thermodynamics or Einstein’s theory of gravity. Lonergan calls this a “classical investigation” of nature. The second is via the patterns of actual events and facts that repeatedly occur in nature. For instance, an astronomer can measure where a planet is every night and make a table of positions. From that table, she can figure out what the planet’s average motion is. Or a geneticist can look at the offspring of a particular species of animal and figure out how often certain traits appear. Lonergan calls this second type of empirical activity “statistical investigation.” He then points out a profound “complementarity” between classical and statistical investigation. On the one hand, the laws of nature discovered by classical investigation are based upon the average occurrence of events or facts uncovered by statistical investigation. For instance, the laws of planetary orbits were derived by abstracting equations from the planets’ average motions observed over many nights. The laws of genetic inheritance are derived by abstracting from the rates at which physical traits occur to an explain how traits are transmitted. On the other hand, statistical investigation tests the validity of classical laws by verifying whether the measured events are configured and ordered in the manner predicted by the theory. Thus, the two go together: laws are abstracted from the behaviors of events, and the behaviors of events occur in patterns governed by the abstract laws. Close attention to the pattern of the behaviors also allows classical laws to be refined. For instance, in the early twentieth century, astronomers were puzzled when measurements of the orbit of Mercury deviated very slightly, but very reliably, from the predictions of Newton’s theory of gravity.⁶ When Einstein formulated his new theory of gravity, one of its first triumphs was that it cohered with the average behavior uncovered by the statistical investigation. The previous theory remained intact in the sense that Newton’s equations provide a pretty good approximation to Einstein’s equations in most regimes, but the classical theory had been refined.

Crucially, though, statistical investigation does more than confirm or refine classical laws: it carries scientific understanding beyond the merely classical to the more complex intelligibility of the world. In isolation, classical theories describe “systematic processes” in which a whole collection of data can be fully understood by the single application of an abstract law (Lonergan, 1992, 71). But as any working scientist will tell you, data never perfectly match the predictions of abstract laws. Lonergan (1992, 109ff, but esp. 117ff) calls these deviations from classical predictions “statistical residues.” The residues may arise from random measurement uncertainties—and we know from quantum theory that at a certain level of precision this randomness is truly irreducible. They can also occur when no single classical law provides a complete explanation of a phenomenon. For instance, the deviation of today’s weather from yesterday’s weather forecast may be explainable by some appropriate combination of thermodynamics, fluid dynamics, and geophysics, but there is no systematic way to relate these classical frameworks that does not sensitively depend on initial conditions. Each day, the relevant conditions are such that the combination and application of classical laws is different, and as a result, weather prediction is never perfect. In “non-systematic processes” like weather, the ensemble of data cannot be explained by a single classical law but requires an unpredictable conjoining of multiple classical explanations (Lonergan, 1992, 72) and inevitably includes some irreducible randomness. Thus, non-systematic processes are intelligible, but their intelligibility is complex.

Moreover, “non-systematic process can be the womb of novelty” (Lonergan, 1992, 75). It is possible for a pattern to emerge in statistical residues that is merely coincidental with regard to one theory or set of theories but that can be explained by a completely new type of theory. The various branches of science exist because what is just a “coincidental manifold” of statistical residues to one science can be explained in a non-coincidental manner by a higher science (Lonergan, 1992, 230). So, to use Lonergan’s (1992, 230, 281ff) example, all of the molecules in a biological cell behave according to chemical laws. However, there are certain very regular patterns of behavior within a cell that are not explained by chemistry. You could not use chemistry to predict a priori that a cell should have particular parts like a nucleus, a membrane, or a Golgi apparatus. Nonetheless, all of these cellular parts are intelligible and require further explanations that chemical theory cannot provide: they require biological theory. When molecules are arranged in particularly precise and complex ways, they become not merely molecules but constituents of a living organism. Biology builds upon chemistry.

The latter example shows that in the interplay between the abstract regularity of the world and the deviations of actual events from that regularity, it is possible for new processes with new intelligibility to emerge. Lonergan (1992, 144ff, but esp. 280ff) calls this “emergent probability.” Note that this concept is a metaphysical principle rather than a scientific theory. It is an explanation for why emergence is possible based on the complementarity between abstract intelligibility and concrete intelligibility, but it does not predict whether a higher system will actually emerge in any particular situation. Whether a higher system emerges or not is an empirical matter that must be determined in the usual scientific way. To return to the example of biology emerging from chemistry, as far as I am aware, we are still ignorant about how that emergence happened. If there is a young planet with a chemical soup floating around, we are not sure whether life will inevitably form, whether it is extremely unlikely, or whether it requires additional scientific ingredients we are currently unaware of. Perhaps one day we shall know the answer. Lonergan’s notion of emergent probability, though, simply explains the mutual open-endedness of classical and statistical intelligibility, of which the appearance of life is a particular instantiation.

Now, we can consider fine-tuning in the context of emergent probability. Fine-tuning is striking because a number of seemingly disparate aspects of the early universe and physics have conspired together to enable a universe like ours to develop. It has the quality of a statistical residue, since the physical conditions of the early universe together with the values of the parameters of physics constitute a concrete pattern not predicted by either the Big Bang theory per se nor the structure of our (current) laws of physics per se. However, this pattern turns out to be just the right one such that particular, complex structures can emerge, like galaxies and stars and planets and a periodic table of elements that can form complex molecules and eventually life. Therefore, the science of physical cosmology, which provides a unified theory explaining the behavior of the universe on its largest scales of space and time, may be the fruit of emergent probability. What appears to elementary physics as merely a “coincidental manifold” (Lonergan, 1992, 230) of parameters may in fact be the basis for the intelligibility of our physical universe as a whole. Now, as stressed, although it appears that the emergence of the pattern called fine-tuning is unlikely in some real sense, this is difficult to quantify. Perhaps it will be discovered that the pattern was inevitable after all and is not actually an example of emergent probability. Perhaps it was a hugely improbably fluke. Perhaps there is a vast multiverse and we inhabit a lucky spot where the right pattern happened to occur. Like the question about how life first appeared on Earth, this array of possibilities appears to me to be empirical in nature—and narrowing down the field is something scientists are working hard at.

However, we might ask whether there is more going on behind the empirical question about fine-tuning. Is there any significance to the fact that fine-tuning is a pattern open to the emergence of further complexly ordered patterns that indeed appear necessary for our very existence?

God and the Contingency of the Actual

To explore this question let me call upon another twentieth-century Jesuit philosopher, Erich Przywara, whose masterpiece Analogia Entis was only translated into English relatively recently (2014). Przywara analyses what it means to be a being in the world, how “creatureliness,” as he puts it, is constituted. He characterizes it as an “immanent dynamic middle.” Thus, not only is creaturely being “immanent,” since it is actual and concrete, but its immanence is a “dynamic middle” that is “suspended” between two kinds of possibility (Przywara 2014, 216). On the one hand, what is actual or immanent is contingent on other states of affair. For instance, this article you are reading is immanent: it is actually before your eyes. But its being here is contingent on a whole host of factors. It is contingent on my having written it; it is contingent on me having thought about the topic of fine-tuning beforehand; it is contingent on my education; it is contingent on your computer screen or printer reproducing the text for you; and so on. On the other hand, what is actual or immanent is also the starting point for what will come next. The concrete is open to something new. This article you are actually reading is moving things forward: by its nature, it opens your understanding out towards a better understanding of fine-tuning—or, perhaps equally, it fails to do so. The point is that it is not a static actuality but one that lays out further possibilities. These possibilities are certainly conditioned. The ideas the article stirs up are dependent on its actual content, how well it is organized and communicated, and how cogent it is. So, it will not move you towards just any old ideas. But exactly what ideas it will stir up in you are still to be seen. The ending point is not completely determined.⁷

Przwyara thus concludes that the actuality of creaturely being is “suspended” (as he puts it) between the possibility out of which it emerges and the end towards which it is opening up. Relating this to traditional philosophical terms, he explains that “actuality (ἐνέργεια) [is] between dynamic possibility (δύναμις) and an inner end-directedness (ἐντελέχεια)” (Przwyara 2014, 216). This means there is a paradox in the being of this world. Beings are actual, but their actuality emerges from possibility and moves towards possibility. They are suspended between possibilities, between non-actualities. In other words, their being—their “isness”⁸—is negatively qualified. Whenever there is a state of affairs, Przywara (2014, 207–8) reasons, it “is not not.” It actually “is,” but it only is contingently. It could not have been if the right conditions had not existed, and it is not what it still can be. It is by virtue of being not not. It is not not actual, because what was only possible has in fact been made actual. And it is not not actual, because what is still possible is not yet, and its actuality obtains here and now (see Hincks 2020, 30). To link this back to Lonergan (1992, 75), “non-systematic process can be the womb of novelty” because statistical residues reveal that classical laws are embedded in a world of “nots” that make room for newness to emerge.

The actual is therefore existentially striking. Aristotle famously observed that the world elicits wonder in us. We encounter a phenomenon, and we want to explain it: we want to know how it came to be and what it can become (Aristotle 2014, I.2, 982b12). In the framework of Przywara, we want to know why it is not not. In the framework of Lonergan, scientists are struck by phenomena and wonder if there is a pattern. They do a statistical investigation to discover the pattern. If they find one, they discern abstract principles in it. Now, the configuration of the early universe and the concrete values of the constants of nature constitute a particularly striking pattern that stimulates wonder. We wonder where it came from and to what extent it was necessary for what came next.

When it comes to the God question, I propose that we miss something significant by jumping immediately from this wonder to the question of what came before or after fine-tuning. To do so is to head away from the is to study the nots between which the is is suspended. Aristotle may have said that wonder drives philosophical inquiry, but he goes on to claim that the goal of philosophy is to remove wonder. Once you understand the causes of something, you no longer wonder about it (Aristotle 2014, I.2, 983a15). But the Divinity, at least in the great religious traditions, is not something that removes wonder, as if you could arrive at a definitive understanding of its nature.

In this vein, Przywara’s chief insight is that the suspension of the actual between possibilities does not resolve itself. The way we humans know is through eliminating possibilities. We only know that something is insofar as it is not not. We know by comparison, by contrast, by elimination. The actual isness of creatures in the universe is never naked; creaturely being is always clothed with nots. But you cannot ultimately get the core notion of is from a not. The notion of isness, of being, must ultimately originate elsewhere (Przywara 2014, 216–37).⁹ In more traditional philosophical language, the being we are familiar with—the being of this universe—is contingent. That is what Przywara means by “not not.” Aquinas’s (1888, I.2.3) famous demonstrations for God’s existence look at this contingency from various angles—from five angles, to be precise—and conclude that the world’s contingency is only resolved in something that is actual per se, and “we call this God.” The is in the is not not of creatures is only finally explained by the unqualified is of God. And since there is no not in the is of God, there is no termination of wonder, unlike in every other sort of investigation.

Thus, I propose that fine-tuning gestures towards God not primarily because he is an explanation for why it was possible for fine-tuning to arise and for the sorts of universe fine-tuning produces, even if that is certainly true in the ultimate analysis of God’s creative power. Rather, the more important clue is the actuality of the fine-tuning: the unqualified wonder that it is. I use the term “unqualified” quite deliberately, because practically everyone who learns about fine-tuning finds it striking and wonderful, but to look for explanations that head away from the actuality—that attempt to qualify it—is paradoxically to head away from God. It is to leave the is in search of the not. Now, that is in fact the correct endeavor for the natural scientist and perhaps for the philosopher as well. When your question is about God, though, it is the wonder, the strikingness, the isness, the being per se that is arguably most relevant, because that is the closest analogy we have to what God is like: the analogy of being (see again Przywara 2014, 216–37).

Conclusion

My assessment of what fine-tuning says about God may appear quite modest. I have framed fine-tuning as a created actuality that has an intelligible pattern. It is actual, but where it comes from and where it heads is provisional, is suspended. The suspension is not resolved in itself and points to a transcendent resolution. There are plenty of other things in the world that point to God through this analogy of being—indeed, everything points to him. You do not need to go to the fine-tuning of the universe to find it, for it is all around you. If you dwell on what is actual in any type of creature or pattern or situation, even in the most ordinary circumstances, you have there a portal to the Divine, even if it is “in a glass, darkly.” To coin a phrase from Ignatian spirituality, you can find God in all things (see Ignatius of Loyola 1952, 235–37). Now, I do not want to dismiss probabilistic arguments outright. But I reckon that they will be most successful insofar as they are framed in the deeper context of the thoroughgoing contingency of the world; otherwise they will be, to return to Tanner (1988, 46; emphasis added), “not radical enough to allow a direct creative involvement of God with the world in its entirety.” For the Abrahamic claim is that God does not just orchestrate coincidences like fine-tuning but that the world depends on him in every respect; hence, Lonergan (2017, 101) can state that “the question of God is implicit in all our questioning,” since every instance of contingency (or “suspension”) prompts questions in us about its origin that remain ultimately unresolved within the world of contingency.

Yet, if fine-tuning is just one example of suspended actuality among many, it is certainly a remarkably striking example. Even if the analogy of being is in the world around us, and indeed within us, it can be hard to see just how remarkable created actuality is when we are busy living in that same world. You have to step outside of your ordinary routine and have a contemplative experience of the natural world, or notice how remarkable it was a concrete decision in the past impacted your subsequent life, or reflect upon the peculiarities of your own culture you are normally unaware of to be struck by the contingency, indeed the strangeness, of the actual. When you have such moments as these in which you pause and see how created actuality is nested before and ahead in possibilities, you get a glimpse of that suspendedness. But immersed as we are in this matrix of “suspended,” “dynamic middles” (Przywara 2014, 216), and therefore usually blind to it, there is an advantage to being able to look out at the cosmos, far from our own familiar world of existence, to see how created being is writ large. As far out in space and back in time as we can see, the actual, the is of creation, is starkly present.

Acknowledgments

The germ of this article was a paper entitled “Cosmic Fine-Tuning and Divine Causality” I presented at the symposium on Understanding Our Place in the Universe: Beyond the Legacy of Stephen Hawking in Jerusalem in 2019. I am grateful to the symposium organizers Eric Priest and Mary Ann Meyers (the latter of whom also provided useful feedback on this essay) and all the other participants for starting me thinking about the topic, and to the John Templeton Foundation for funding my participation in that symposium and my work on this article. I developed my thoughts further for a 2023 lecture jointly sponsored by the Christianity and Culture Program at the University of St. Michael’s College (at the University of Toronto) and the University of St. Michael’s College Philosophy Group. I am grateful for funding received from the latter, and I thank Michael Vertin and Reid Locklin for the invitation and organization of the lecture. This article is largely based on that talk. Finally, I thank Stephen Barr, Vincent Strand, S.J., and an anonymous reviewer for helpful comments on a draft of this article; Dr. Barr’s suggestions in particular prompted me to add the paragraphs on miracles and guided their contents.