God-less Religion

“The phrase ‘God-less religion’ is surely applicable to pantheism which is the fashionable religion of today. John Henry Newman prognostication, ‘pantheism is the great deceit which awaits the age to come’ has come true, except for the fact that if you call it pantheism. One of its names is, tellingly, New Age. Another name is environmentalism. The man of today wants so much a religion minus God as to prefer to speak only of the pan ( one of the words of the Greeks of old, for the universe, or great nature) and ignore as much as possible “theism,” evocative as this word is of the true God.  Modern man does not even want to know that he has made nature, (including his own nature) his one and only god.

Pantheism should seem a God-less religion in contrast to the notion of God which half a century ago and certainly a century ago was still widely present in public discourse. According to that notion, God is a being wholly transcendent to nature, and indeed a being on whom nature is dependent in every sense.”

-from ” Questions on Science and Religion”.- Fr. Stanley Jaki