For most people, the immediate objection to the claim that minds are brains is that it conflicts with their religious beliefs about immortality. Their faith says that God created souls that can survive the death of their bodies. But I argued earlier in this chapter that there is no good evidence for immortality, and in the previous chapter I showed why evidence provides a better way of justifying beliefs than does faith. Another sweeping rejection of my approach would be the postmodernist
charge that I dogmatically ignore the philosophical view currently dominant in cultural studies that the world is just a text and that science is just one of many equally good ways of talking about it. My defense of evidence over faith in Chapter 2 is one part of a response to this view, and a further response will be found in Chapter 4's discussion of the nature of reality and its independence of mind.