One of my favorite Blogs “Gods of the Coppybook Headings” has an interesting post on Objectivism, Conservatism and the Religious Right.
What provoked Whittaker Chambers visceral reaction to Atlas Shrugged was that same belief; without God there is no soul and so we are simply animals. I suspect what underlies Leonard Peikoff’s frustration at the survival of religion is the attitude that anyone, whatever their education or intelligence, could possible believe that the soul of man needs a mystical explanation. This is not a quibble over esoteric details, but one of the central debates of Western history, and upon its outcome has turned much of that history. The Victorians fell back upon religion because they could not imagine a soul without God, which is exactly the direction the enlightenment was heading in at the time of the French Revolution.