In the old mythologies, nature was worshiped as a God. Many cultures had Gods that represented different natural processes, such as light, thunder, rain, growth, etc. Christianity denied the natural Gods by claiming there was only One, and He lived beyond them. It taught man that he had a divine right to control nature, just like his God could, for we were made in His image.
The old gods were abandoned because they represented the power nature had over us that we sought to control. Christianity overpowered the old gods in more ways than one; not only did it conquer them spiritually, but physically as well by giving followers divine merits to harness their power. If we still believed in the natural ones, we wouldn't be building damns, cutting down trees, and threatening the existence of more species than we can keep pace with.
Now we are lost mythologically. Things are moving so fast that we can't keep pace. There isn't enough time between advances in technology for new myths to take root. But if we could slow down time, the new gods would be based on the most powerful institutions of the modern world. We'd have gods for stocks, computing, the Internet, television, cars and airplanes, among others.
Neil Gaiman wasn't far from the truth in his novel American Gods. The reality is that if civilization stagnated, or worse fell apart, we would no longer know what powers drove these institutions. They'd appear magical to us, just like natural processes did in the past. We'd have to create new myths to explain them because the power of reason requires an explanation. The same power that drove us to use stories to rationalize things long ago would assign new ones for the new gods.
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