Fifth, it led to naturalism, in particular in the hands of David Hume. Sixth, scientific achievement seemed to exonerate modernist ideals. Seventh, knowledge achieves universality, that it is true for all people everywhere for all time and in the same way. Thus modernity produces what Lyotard called meta-narratives, accounts of reality which claim to transcend circumstances. Eighth, modernity affected theology, producing higher criticism in liberal theology and a focus on method in conservative theology.
Postmodernism is a reaction to, or better, a rejection of the ideology of modernity.
Deconstruction, in the hands of Jacques Derrida, claims that there is no privileged position to be called knowledge. Also, the meaning of words or texts is bound up with the interpreter, so that a text has many meanings, none privileged. Deconstruction is the process which shows that an alleged true meaning or account is just an interpretation like all others. There are a number of important cultural correlatives of postmodernism, according to Carson, which help cause or are caused by postmodernism. All the same, there is some truth in postmodernism, says Carson.