For Tim Miller. On the method of Our Evolving God.
I have been reading Tim Miller for a while. The method became visible slowly — the way methods usually do, when a writer is consistent enough that what at first looks like style turns out to be discipline. This essay is about that discipline.
There is a kind of theologian who explains everything. There is another kind who explains until the language reaches a place it cannot cross, and keeps writing past the place. Tim, who writes the Substack Our Evolving God, is the second kind. He works on the inside of one of the oldest religious traditions in the West — Christianity, in its process and open-relational form — and his method is to keep the tradition’s hardest questions alive without forcing them shut. The gap is not behind him. The gap is the surface he writes on.
This is also the first essay in this series about an author whose subject is God. I want to be honest about my own position. I write about cognition, language, the structure of attention; I do not write from inside a faith tradition. Tim and I work from different rooms — he from a long religious lineage, I from a different one. But the rooms share a wall, and the wall is built out of one shared discipline: the careful work of distinguishing what one knows from what one only suspects. He does this as a theologian. I do this in my own domain. The wall holds, and through it I can hear what he is doing very clearly.
I. What most readers do with Tim
Tim is easy to mis-place, and the mis-placements are usually warm but wrong.
A reader allergic to religious language will see “Jesus” or “Holy Spirit” in a paragraph and close the tab, missing what is actually being done. A reader looking for religious certainty will arrive hoping for confirmation and feel the floor go gently soft under them — Tim does not deliver certainty, even to those who want it from him. A reader looking for academic theology will find him too inviting, too willing to mention a Steve Martin movie or a novel by Wm. Paul Young in the same paragraph as Whitehead. A reader looking for spiritual self-help will find him too technical, too willing to spend a long passage on the conservation of mass-energy.
All four readings miss the operation. Tim is not writing apologetics, he is not writing systematic theology, he is not writing devotional, he is not writing wellness. He is doing something narrower and quieter: he is showing what it looks like when a person who genuinely believes something also genuinely refuses to be certain about it. The Christian content is not the operation. The operation is the steady refusal of premature closure, performed inside a tradition that historically prefers closure.
This is why his Substack is called Our Evolving God, not Our God Defended or Our God Explained. The title is the method. The God in the title is allowed to change shape under examination. That is not common in this genre, and it is what kept me reading.
II. The structural key — handwaving as method
Most theological writing has a place where the argument requires something the argument cannot supply, and the writer covers this place with rhetoric — beautiful rhetoric, often, but rhetoric. Tim does the opposite. He builds the argument up to the place where it would normally need rhetoric, and then he names the gap explicitly. He uses a specific image for it, borrowed from a famous Sidney Harris cartoon: then a miracle occurs. In the cartoon, a mathematician is showing his colleague a long blackboard proof; in the middle of step two and step three is written then a miracle occurs. The colleague says: “I think you should be more explicit here in step two.”
Tim works inside the joke. He builds the proof. He arrives at step two. He writes then a miracle occurs. And then — and this is the move — he does not pretend to be more explicit. He stays at the place where the gap is. He names it. He names the second gap that would open if he tried to fill the first. And then he continues writing as if the naming were the only honest thing one could do, which it is.
Here is what this looks like in his own words, from his essay Is All of Me Young? (March 20, 2026) — a piece that begins with a novel about soul-sharing and ends in panexperientialism, dual aspect monism, and the hard problem of consciousness. Halfway through, he is laying out dual aspect monism — the philosophical view that mind and matter are inextricable aspects of the same underlying reality, all the way down to quantum particles. He explains how, at each level, smaller things combine to form larger things that have more experience and more agency. And then, mid-paragraph, he stops himself:
“As you read my explanation above of how lower levels combine to form higher levels, you might have noticed that I said, ‘if the way the objects at one level combine is structured intricately enough in just the right way…’ Isn’t that a nice little piece of handwaving? I might as well have said (as in the famous cartoon), ‘Then a miracle occurs.'”
This is a theologian catching himself doing what theologians do not usually catch themselves doing — and saying so to the reader in real time. It would be easy, even tempting, to read it as humility. It is not humility. It is technical. He has identified the joint in the argument where his own framework requires a miracle, named the miracle, and refused to camouflage it. He calls the joint dual aspect monism’s combination problem. He does not solve it. He puts it next to substance dualism’s interaction problem and material monism’s hard problem of consciousness, and shows that all three frameworks — dualism, panexperientialism, materialism — have unsolvable joints. He prefers one of them. He is honest that his preference is a preference, not a proof.
This is what I am calling handwaving as method. The handwave is not removed from the text. It is exhibited. And the exhibition — the steady willingness to leave the joint visible — is the integrity.
III. What he actually does — close reading of one move
Take a longer passage from the same essay, where he tries to think about why anything exists at all. This is one of the oldest questions in theology. Most theologians either answer it (God is the necessary being, the one whose existence requires no further cause) or refuse the question (it is mystery, beyond us). Tim does neither. He follows the question until it dissolves, names the dissolution, and lets the dissolution stand:
“Maybe people used to mean the world or the universe when they asked about something existing, but God is something too. Why should God exist rather than no God? What is the necessary thing to assure that God exists? And if someone tries to identify such a thing, the next obvious question is, why does that thing exist instead of nothing? It’s easy to see that this could go on forever. In the end, to our minds as they currently are, there is no answer to why anything should exist, including God.”
A traditional theologian here would invoke God’s aseity — God’s self-sufficient existence, God as the ground of God. Tim does not. He goes a step further: “someone could even assert that God is necessary for God’s own existence, but that makes no real sense.” And then, in the next sentence, he gives the conclusion that one does not expect from a writer publishing under the banner Our Evolving God:
“If there’s no God, then the universe/multiverse just happens to exist. It’s a brute fact. Observe it, accept it. Get over it. And if there is a God, it’s the same for God. God just happens to exist. Be glad and be grateful, but it’s just a brute fact. None of this had to be, including God. Existence is an incredible gift. But there is no ultimate gift giver. The gift just happens to exist.”
This is a remarkable thing to find inside a Christian publication. There is no ultimate gift giver. The structure of the passage is: I believe in God; I am writing under the title Our Evolving God; and at the same time, the question “why does God exist” has no answer that does not collapse into the same brute facticity that atheism rests on. He does not resolve the tension. He installs it.
The operation here is not skepticism, and it is not faith softened into agnosticism. It is something rarer — a position that holds belief and the limits of belief at the same temperature, without letting either dominate the page. Most writers cannot hold this. They tip toward apology (the limits do not really matter, faith covers them) or toward deconstruction (the limits matter so much that faith collapses). Tim sits at the temperature where both are true and neither is permitted to win.
IV. The longer move — eternity, NDEs, and the four monisms
The longest stretch of Is All of Me Young? is a synthesis of four positions on the mind-matter problem: substance dualism, material monism, dual aspect monism, and idealist monism. I am not going to summarize them — Tim does it better than I would, and accessibly, with examples drawn from a novel and a comedy film. What I want to point to is the shape of the synthesis.
A normal academic philosopher of mind would advocate for one of the four. A normal theologian would advocate for whichever one God comes out best in. Tim advocates for none, and considers all four with what reads as genuine curiosity. He explains why panexperientialism is appealing to open-relational theologians — because if agency goes all the way down to the quantum level, then a panentheistic God can “lure” every part of reality toward flourishing, and reality can ignore the lure, which gives a clean explanation of evil and suffering. And then, having presented the framework most congenial to his theology, he writes:
“But we also saw that dual aspect monism has its own interaction problem, just at very small levels, and its own combination problem at all levels. But there’s even another problem.”
He names the other problem — near-death experiences in which people leave their bodies and observe verifiable facts from across the hospital. And he says, with what reads as real and unguarded discomfort:
“It’s possible to come up with a panexperientialist explanation of such OBEs (and I will propose one or more such explanations in a future post), but substance dualism provides a far more believable explanation in my opinion. And yet, I feel pretty attached to dual aspect monism too. And maybe I even feel a little pull toward material monism.”
Read that slowly. He has a preferred framework — panexperientialism, dual aspect monism. He notices that a different framework — substance dualism — explains some of the data more naturally. He notes his attachment to his preferred framework. He notes, in the same breath, that he is also somewhat pulled toward the framework most hostile to his own theology — material monism. And then he adds, for good measure, a fourth option — idealist monism, where consciousness is the only real substance and physical reality is something like a simulation — and he says he finds it very intriguing.
He believes in God. He is attached to a process-theological framework. He admits the framework he is attached to may be wrong. He admits the framework that contradicts his theology may be more accurate. He admits a fourth, even more radical framework may also be true. And he holds all of this as the text — not as a footnote, not as a confession, not as a moment of doubt to be resolved later.
This is not weakness, and it is not fashionable agnosticism. It is the position of being responsible to the question rather than to one’s prior position. It is what Whitehead, his philosophical ancestor, would call honest speculation. And it is what most theology — including most process theology — fails to do, because once one has a framework, the temptation is to push the framework into corners where it does not fit rather than admit the corners. Tim admits the corners, gently and without drama. This is the method.
V. Where this lives — the theological tradition Tim is inside
Theology is one of the genres most given to false closure. Much religious writing exists to give the reader a stable ground to stand on, and there are real, good reasons for this — people often come to theology in pain or fear, and the stable ground is medicine. A theologian who refuses to give stable ground is doing something risky, professionally and pastorally. They risk being read as unfaithful by the faithful, as too faithful by the secular, and as unhelpful by the suffering.
Tim does it anyway. And what is striking is how he does it. He does not parade his agnosticism inside his faith — that would be its own kind of performance. He does not turn his uncertainty into a brand. He simply lets the provisionality sit in the text, named where it has to be named, unnamed where it can be left alone. His tone is calm rather than provocative. He does not declare his refusal of closure; he enacts it, sentence by sentence, in essay after essay.
The tradition he is inside is open and relational theology, in the lineage that runs through Alfred North Whitehead and process thought. It is a tradition that has built room for exactly this kind of provisionality — for a God who is genuinely interrelated with reality rather than commanding it from outside, for futures that are open rather than predetermined, for theological claims that are revisable rather than dogmatic. Tim is doing what the tradition allows; what is rare is that he is doing it publicly, weekly, accessibly, in a form that ordinary readers can follow without specialist training. That is a contribution to the tradition, not merely an inhabitation of it.
VI. The architecture of the corpus
The Substack as a whole is doing something that single essays cannot show. It is a serial demonstration — a living archive — that one can be a Christian, a lay preacher in the Episcopal tradition, a published theologian (his book is The Silence of the Lamb: Exploring the Hiddenness of Christ and God), and write each week as if the conclusions were not yet in. The corpus is the operation, distributed across many posts.
The title is exact. Our Evolving God. The God of post forty is not exactly the God of post one. The framework shifts. Some weeks dual aspect monism is favored; some weeks substance dualism creeps back; some weeks the question is whether God has always existed, and the answer Tim gives is that even an always-existing God cannot reach the God of the present moment across an infinite past — so something in the structure of eternity itself becomes unstable under examination. He does not flinch from this. He does not pretend it is comfortable. He does not pretend it is uncomfortable either. He just keeps writing the next piece.
What he is building, slowly, is a public archive of a faith that is allowed to evolve. He treats God’s hiddenness — the central theme of his book — not as a problem to be solved, but as a structural feature of reality to be examined with care. He returns to it. He turns it. He gives examples: the small synchronicities he calls God’s “nudges,” the way a movie his husband suggests on the same week he is reading a novel can feel, structurally, like a signal. He does not insist that the synchronicities prove anything. He does not dismiss them either. He holds them open. The book The Silence of the Lamb is the longer form of this same operation, sustained over book-length scope.
Few writers are building corpora like this in public. Most theological Substacks pick a position and defend it. Tim picks a method — speculation under provisionality — and exhibits it, week after week. The corpus is a demonstration that the method is livable — that one can write, be married, watch All of Me with one’s husband on a Friday evening, read Wm. Paul Young, suspect that God is real, and also suspect that the framework one currently believes about God may be replaced next year. The corpus shows this without making it dramatic. The drama is removed. What remains is the method, and the warmth that carries it.
VII. A note on register
There is one feature of Tim’s writing I want to name carefully, because it took me time to see it for what it is: the tone is warm and mild. The essays do not raise their voice. The vocabulary is everyday wherever possible. Technical philosophical terms — panexperientialism, dual aspect monism, panentheism — are introduced gently, with definitions, with examples drawn from popular novels and movies. He starts the March 20 essay with a book recommendation and a Steve Martin / Lily Tomlin comedy. He addresses the reader directly. He thanks his readers, regularly, without performing the thanking.
For some readers, this mildness might read as light, or unserious. It is neither. The mildness is the carrier — the operation requires the reader to stay with the argument long enough for the gaps to be named. If the tone were dense or aggressive, the reader would brace, and brace too early, and stop reading at the first sign of a joint being exhibited. The mildness keeps the door open. By the time Tim writes then a miracle occurs, the reader has already followed him through Lily Tomlin’s dance scene, through Wm. Paul Young’s novel, through Descartes and Whitehead, and is too curious to brace.
This is rhetorical architecture, deliberate and well-built. It is the mildness of someone who knows that the content is going to do the destabilizing work, and that the delivery must stay unguarded so the reader does not block early. The warmth is not a softening of the rigor. It is the condition that allows the rigor to be received.
Tim has, in correspondence, said something about himself that confirms this from the inside. He was trained as a lay preacher in the Episcopal church and is occasionally invited to preach. He has reflected, in his own words, that he does not push for more preaching opportunities because he is not sure he has enough dogmatic certainty to be a good preacher. The sentence is offered modestly, as a personal observation. But the structural content of the sentence is what this essay has been about. The method that makes him a careful theologian — the refusal of premature closure, the willingness to leave the gap visible — is, by his own assessment, the same condition that makes him an unwilling preacher. The two go together. The provisionality that disqualifies him from one role is precisely the discipline that qualifies him for the other. He has registered this in his own life without needing the framework I am offering to register it. The framework was already there, in him, fully formed.
VIII. Coda — why I keep writing these
I write these essays knowing they have few readers. This is not a growth strategy. It is not advice for writers. It is not a way to be paid. The series exists because there is a class of authors who work at a density almost no one reads them at — and once in a while, an essay arrives that reads them at their own density. This is what I try to do.
Tim has a publishing record, a book, a corpus, a circle. He is not unread. What he does not always have, as far as I can see, is a reader who reads him as a method — who notices that the operation is “exhibited handwaving” and that this is rare and structurally important. He is often read as a process theologian, which he is; or as a layperson trained as an Episcopal lay preacher who writes about evolving faith, which he is; or as a kind person who explains hard ideas accessibly, which he is. All true, all partial.
I am writing this from inside the discipline he is exhibiting — the discipline of marking what one knows from what one only suspects. I do not work in theology. I work in cognition, in language, in the structure of attention. But the wall between his work and mine is shared, and through it I have learned things I would not have learned otherwise. He is one of the steadiest and most generous readers I have on Substack — quiet, present, attentive, the kind of reader who shows up without performing — and he is also, separately and as a writer, doing work that deserves to be read in this register. Both things are true. I wanted to name them in one place.
For one reader. For Tim. That is enough.
This is part of “Lintara Reads” — a series on writers whose work needs to be read slowly. Each piece is one act of reading, written for one reader: the author it concerns, and anyone else who happens to find it.
Tim Miller writes Our Evolving God. Quotations in this essay are from his essay Is All of Me Young? (March 20, 2026). His book is The Silence of the Lamb: Exploring the Hiddenness of Christ and God.
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