Jeffrey Jay Lowder

Jeffrey Jay Lowder is an American secular writer best known as co-founder (1995) and past president of Internet Infidels, the organization behind the Secular Web (infidels.org), one of the longest-running online archives of metaphysical naturalist and freethought literature. Trained in business and information security rather than academic philosophy, Lowder has nonetheless produced extensive popular-level work in the philosophy of religion, with an emphasis on evidential rather than logical arguments against theism. He co-edited with Robert M. Price the volume The Empty Tomb: Jesus Beyond the Grave (Prometheus, 2005), a collection of skeptical essays responding to Christian apologetic defenses of the resurrection, particularly those of William Lane Craig, Gary Habermas, and N. T. Wright. Lowder's writing favors Bayesian and cumulative-case reasoning, often drawing on Paul Draper's evidential formulations of the problem of evil and the argument from the biological role of pain and pleasure. He has participated in public debates with apologists including Phil Fernandes and Kyle Butt, and maintains the long-running blog The Secular Outpost (later Secular Frontier) at Patheos and Freethought Blogs. Lowder is notable within organized atheism for criticizing the rhetorical excesses of New Atheism and insisting on rigorous, charitable engagement with theistic philosophers. His work occupies a popularizing rather than peer-reviewed academic register, and his historical-Jesus claims in The Empty Tomb have drawn sharp criticism from confessional New Testament scholars.