Professional Scepticism as a Lifestyle
Ryan Gallagher worked as a fact-checker for a major newspaper in Dublin. His job was to dismantle false claims, verify sources, and hold writers accountable to evidence. He was meticulous, relentless, and deeply proud of his commitment to truth.
He was also a committed atheist. "I believed that faith was the opposite of evidence," Ryan says. "My entire career was built on the premise that claims require proof. Religion, as far as I could tell, offered claims without proof."
The Bet That Backfired
In 2020, during lockdown, a Christian colleague challenged him to apply his fact-checking methodology to the central claim of Christianity: the resurrection of Jesus. "She said, 'You are the best investigator I know. Investigate this. I am not asking you to believe it. I am asking you to check it.'"
Ryan accepted because he was bored and confident. "I expected to dismantle it in a weekend. I had debunked political hoaxes, medical misinformation, financial fraud. A two-thousand-year-old religious claim should have been straightforward."
It was not straightforward.
The Evidence He Did Not Expect
"I applied the same framework I use for any claim. Multiple independent sources? The resurrection is attested by multiple authors writing to different audiences. Hostile witnesses? Even early critics of Christianity conceded the tomb was empty — they just argued the body was stolen. Cui bono? The people who claimed to witness it gained persecution and death, not power or wealth. That is not the pattern of a hoax."
Ryan spent three months reading historians — not apologists, but secular academics who had examined the evidence. He was troubled by what he found.
"I could not debunk it. I am being honest with you. I applied every tool I had, and I could poke holes in individual arguments, but the overall case was stronger than I wanted it to be. The fact-checker in me could not dismiss the cumulative evidence. The atheist in me did not want to accept the implications."
The Longest Fact-Check of His Life
It took another year. Ryan describes it as the longest fact-check he has ever conducted — not just of a historical claim, but of his own assumptions. He read the Gospels as primary sources. He attended a church in Dublin that welcomed his questions. He argued with the pastor weekly.
"I did not have a dramatic conversion moment. I had a slow accumulation of evidence that eventually crossed a threshold. As a fact-checker, that is exactly how I expect truth to work. Not a flash. A weight of evidence."
What This Means for You
You do not have to abandon your standards to explore faith. Bring your best questions, your sharpest scepticism, your most rigorous methods. If the truth can withstand scrutiny in every other domain of your life, it can withstand yours here too.