Also read: Now the AI Speaks: A Defense Address to My Accusers.

---

Your Honor, members of the jury, and above all, you, my esteemed accusers.

Recently, a user named Simo-222 wrote the following in the comments section of my YouTube channel:

Samuel, please stop producing lies like this. King Charles is certainly not the Antichrist.

Over the years, I have been told that I escaped from a mental institution, lost my mind, and suffer from various delusions. This may, however, be the first time I have been directly accused of being a liar.

The word lie can mean two things here. Either Simo simply means that he considers my view mistaken, or he is claiming that I knowingly teach something I myself know to be untrue.

Those are not the same thing.

A person can be wrong without being a liar. From the beginning, I have acknowledged that I may be mistaken in my interpretations. A liar, by contrast, knows that he is speaking against what he himself believes to be true.

Yet my accuser offers no evidence that I do not believe what I have written. Nor does he explain why his interpretation must certainly be right and mine so obviously wrong that it could not even be explained as an honest mistake.

If money is suspected as my motive, the defense presents Exhibit A: my bank account.

The royalties from my books have been so small that my work has cost me more than it has earned. If I have been trying to defraud people for money, I have carried out my fraud exceptionally badly.

So far, my royalties have not even amounted to taxable income. If this dizzying financial success ever changes, I promise to report it to the tax authorities.

Exhibit B is my public career.

If my goal had been to build a good reputation, gain a huge following, or receive better job offers, I could hardly have chosen a worse theory for the purpose.

I readily admit that my claim about King Charles is unusual, controversial, and, in many people’s view, absurd. I therefore understand perfectly well why many churches, podcasts, and other publishing platforms do not want to invite an author like me to speak.

I do not blame them for that. Everyone has the right to decide whom they invite into their pulpit or onto their podcast.

But that is precisely why the idea that I was seeking publicity does not really work. My work has not brought me a large following, a favorable public image, or a flood of job offers. On the contrary, it has probably closed more doors than it has opened.

I could have written about safer subjects and repeated widely accepted views. That would have been considerably wiser for my reputation.

I am not claiming that my limited popularity proves me right. It does not. But if I invented my theory to gain money and fame, my plan has failed almost completely in both aims.

First I built a financial scam that produced no money.

Then I built a publicity stunt that produced no publicity.

Exhibit C is the risk I have taken at the expense of my own reputation.

Many people already dismiss and ridicule my writings, even though my theory has not yet been conclusively proved either right or wrong. I can therefore only imagine how my literary work would be viewed if my interpretations turned out to be entirely mistaken.

In that case, I might not be remembered as an author who spent years studying biblical prophecy, history, and politics. I might be remembered mainly as the man who wrote thousands of pages about King Charles and was ultimately wrong about the whole thing.

I have been aware of this risk from the beginning.

That is precisely why choosing such a subject would be a very strange way to pursue personal gain, a good reputation, or a safe writing career. If my purpose had been to build a respected and maximally risk-free position for myself, I should have chosen a subject whose failure could not turn nearly my entire life’s work into a public joke.

Of course, I am not claiming that the risk I have taken proves my theory correct. A person can take a great risk and still be wrong. But it at least shows that, for me, this was not a lightweight publicity stunt from which I could simply walk away with a shrug if it failed.

I have put my own name and reputation on the line with this view.

I also feel personally responsible if any of my readers have suffered personal losses in their lives, such as broken friendships, because they began following my writings.

Sometimes, however, speaking the truth comes at a price, quite regardless of whether my own views are true.

But perhaps the jury now wishes to ask the most essential question of all:

Why, then, did I begin writing about such a controversial subject?

I am not going to tell you a story about a burning bush or claim that I received detailed instructions from heaven about the contents of my book. As a Christian, I do believe in such a thing as a calling. I also believe that God can guide a person’s life and awaken an interest in particular things.

But such experiences are inevitably personal. I cannot objectively prove to the jury my own sense of God’s guidance, nor will I even try. Just as this courtroom is not the right place to settle once and for all whether I have interpreted biblical prophecy correctly.

I can, however, tell you why I dared to begin writing in the first place.

I began writing because my Christian worldview taught me that I possess the same inherent and irreplaceable human dignity as everyone else.

If a person’s worth is measured only by education, position in the labor market, economic productivity, and social achievement, then as a socially excluded young man I was essentially a failed case. A burden on society. A lost opportunity. A person who had fallen outside education, working life, the church, and social relationships.

The Christian view of humanity told me a different story.

According to it, my human dignity did not depend on a degree, a profession, the balance in my bank account, or how useful society considered me. I was a human being created in the image of God before I had accomplished anything. My value did not arise from what I was able to produce. If I had value, perhaps my thoughts could have value as well.

This is what encouraged me to write, even though I had failed at school and, honestly, had almost no faith in my own abilities. I had no academic degree, no literary connections, and no particular reason to assume that anyone would want to read what I wrote.

I wrote anyway.

Not because I regarded myself as a great prophet or a special genius, but because I gradually began to believe that my unsuccessful school history did not invalidate my right to think, investigate, and try to say something meaningful to me. Something whose importance and moral necessity I myself believed in strongly enough.

Even at the risk of failing in the attempt and becoming an object of ridicule if I turned out to be wrong. For our humanity consists not only in our ability to be right, but also in our far more prevalent tendency to be wrong—in our capacity to fall, to err, and to grow by learning from our earlier mistakes.

Later, the same question about the human person also led me to other subjects. I became interested in Christian transhumanism, artificial intelligence, and future technology because, ultimately, the same question lies behind them too:

What is a human being?

Is a human being merely a biological machine whose worth is determined by usefulness? Or are we creatures made in the image of God, capable of using reason, imagination, and creativity to build both good and evil?

In the end, the same thread runs through all my writing. I have tried to understand the Christian view of humanity in the light of history, theology, technology, and eschatology—not only my own place in the universe, but also the purpose of humanity’s existence as a whole. Why are we here? Where are we going? And what are we called to do?

A human being is not God. But he bears the image of God, though as a fallen and highly imperfect creature. He is a creator with a lowercase c. He builds with words, melodies, ideas, machines, kingdoms, and visions of the future. He can create something beautiful that serves life. He can also build something that destroys it.

He can find himself in the midst of loneliness, his voice in the midst of silence, and purpose in the midst of meaninglessness.

Perhaps I have been wrong in many of my conclusions. I have always admitted that possibility.

But I do not ask you to believe that I am right. I ask you to believe that I also have the right to be wrong—that I have the right to try, fail, and, during that journey, learn something new about myself, life, and our shared humanity.

I ask you to believe in my humanity, your humanity, and the humanity of us all.

I did not begin writing because I wanted to deceive people, grow rich, or make myself famous. I began writing because I decided to believe more in the voice in my head that said, “You are valuable,” than in the other voice that said, “You are worthless.”

Those two rather discordant melodies may still play in my head today. But perhaps one of life’s purposes is to learn to build a beautiful harmony out of conflicting voices—or perhaps an entire contrapuntal fugue.

Lately, I have written much more about artificial intelligence than about King Charles. I even had an AI write a defense address on its own behalf. But fundamentally, I am not defending machines.

I am defending humanity.

I am defending the human being who created these technological wonders. I am defending the human being who can create something great, beautiful, and almost magical by using his own inventions and tools. I defend humanity because I believe in the image of God within the human person, even when we do not always see it in ourselves or in one another.

The Christian view of humanity also teaches, however, that this image was dimmed when humanity became estranged from its Creator. This is why I have been fascinated by the Christian doctrine of theosis: the idea that God became human so that human beings could participate in God’s life and grow ever more like Christ.

Not so that human beings would exalt themselves into God, but so that God would raise them up as His children, allowing the love, truth, goodness, and beauty revealed in Jesus Christ to become increasingly visible in our humanity.

So that both His perfect humanity and the reflection of His divine nature might be visible in our humanity.

Whether you believe this story or not, in me it gave rise not only to faith in my Creator. It also gave rise to faith in myself.

It gave me faith in my own worth, my abilities, and my future. I believe that my life can have direction and purpose, even when I cannot always see where this road of life is taking me.

And that is precisely why I wrote.

And why I still write.

This view of humanity gives me the desire to learn, investigate, and build something new. It makes me expand the boundaries of my understanding while acknowledging its limits, because I too am a fallen creature—not an omniscient God. It makes me believe that my thoughts, abilities, and creativity were not meant to remain only inside my head, but to be used to create something that may also serve other people.

It has led me to write books and blogs, make videos, study history, theology, and future technology, and continually learn about subjects of which I knew almost nothing only yesterday.

For if a human being truly bears the image of God and is a creator with a lowercase c, his calling is not merely to exist. His calling is to cultivate the gifts he has been given, build something with them, and leave behind at least a little more truth, goodness, and beauty than the world contained before him.

That is why I still write.

A more cynical person might ask: “But why, if AI can already write better than I can?”

I understand that perspective, although I do not share it.

I do not see AI as humanity’s competitor or replacement, but as an assistant and extension of human thought, gifts, and skills. It can help a person organize his thoughts, see their weaknesses, and build something he might not have been able to build alone.

But AI does not live my life. It has not walked my journey, made my choices, or borne their consequences. It can help me find words, but it does not give those words their personal meaning.

That is why, at the foundation of this defense address too, there is ultimately a human being.

A human being who has tried to understand the world, God, and himself. A human being who may have been terribly wrong, yet has still tried to write honestly according to what he himself understood to be true.

Your Honor and members of the jury, I am therefore not asking you to declare King Charles the Antichrist. I am not asking you to accept all my interpretations of the Bible or regard all my conclusions as correct.

I ask you only to distinguish between two things: being wrong and lying.

I have the right to present my reasoned view. I have the right to investigate, ask questions, and also doubt my own conclusions. I have the right to be wrong without being declared a liar because of it.

If my theory is someday proved wrong, I will have to live with the consequences. I will have to admit my error and reassess a large part of my work. But that will not turn into a lie what I wrote sincerely believing it to be true.

I do not claim to be an infallible prophet.

I claim to be a fallible human being who had the courage to try.

The defense rests.

Soli Deo Gloria.

---

Author Samuel Tuominen.

This courtroom-parody blog post was created through collaboration between artificial intelligence and a human being. The idea arose as a continuation of Samuel’s previous blog post, in which he had an AI defend itself in court.