Relevance of Fine‑Tuning to Aquinas’s Fifth Way

Determine whether cosmic fine‑tuning bears on Aquinas’s Fifth Way argument from the governance of things—which concerns the regularity and intelligibility of natural processes—and, if it does, specify the precise manner in which fine‑tuning contributes to that argument.

Background

The paper contrasts Paley‑style probabilistic design arguments leveraging fine‑tuning with Aquinas’s Fifth Way, which infers divine governance from the ordered regularity of natural processes rather than from particular exceptional facts.

It is explicitly uncertain whether fine‑tuning, as a specific set of empirical facts, is even pertinent to Aquinas’s argument focused on general intelligibility.