Thoughts on Modernity

Shanna's post (which I was very glad to see more people start contributing!) relates a good deal to the some thoughts I have been having about the dominant ideas of Modernity. So I thought I would lay these out in parallel to her thoughts.
By "modernity," I mean the philosophical movement or system which developed among intellectuals initially out of the Enlightenment or "Age of Reason" in the 17th & 18th centuries, and spread to more mainstream audiences in the 19th century. Of course, all movements have diversity within them, but there were notable ideologies which were central to the movement which are worth identifying.
In terms of epistemology, or means of determining what is knowable, modernity was committed to empiricism- that which can be discerned through the senses. In terms of presuppositions, modernity held to naturalism, a pre-commitment to physical matter as the only empirically valid reality. In terms of anthropology, view of humanity, the movement developed over time. During the enlightenment, most early or proto-moderns endorsed philosophical deism. Deism posited some manner of creator of both the physical universe and human beings. (This language of creation is evident in Jefferson's Declaration, for instance.) Deism holds that this deity created the universe according to natural law as a clockmaker creates a clock. This deity was necessary in their philosophical system primarily to answer questions of origins, and was desirably absent in most ways traditionally held by theism. (Other gods, possible imperfections of this deity, this deity's origins and present activities are all left undefined by deism.) After Darwin's Origin of Species was published in 1858, its explanation of human origins allowed for a jettisoning of deism in favor of pure naturalism. With Darwin, the anthropology associated with modernity by the end of 19th century grew out of and reinforced its empirical epistemology and naturalistic presuppositions. As a system. these three items work well together.
A fourth ideology of modernity that may not be as solid a fit is that of optimism or progress. The thrust behind this was a confidence in the triumph of science and humanistic progress. Moderns could look to the advancements in technology from 1850 to 1900 and could be positively glowing in their projections for where humanity would be by 1950. (It was in this era that projections were made of flying cars for everyone by 1980.) The central ideologies of modernity set themselves up in diametric opposition to the epistemology, presuppositions, anthropology and pessimism of traditional theistic Christianity.
The ideologies of modernity moved into the mainstream of American life with the coming of large-scale urbanization during the late 1800s. As the modern cities grew, so did the ideas which accompanied the spread of electricity, the germ-theory of medicine, etc. As these ideas triumphed, first in the University and later the industrial city, traditional Christian ideologies came to be seen as antiquated, hopelessly mythological, or ignorant barriers to progress.

Part 2 looking at Christian responses to Modernity to come