Being pattern-recognizing creatures, we naturally floundered for something to explain why bad things happen, and in the absence of God, many of us see the invisible hand of intention where none exists.

Gee, this sounds suspiciously just like what Kant said in the Dialectic of Pure Reason. And he went on to say that the church had a social function, in terms of building a sense of community, even if god was out of the picture.

It sounds like he reads Voltaire the same way Rand reads Nietzsche, cherry picking and with a strong interpretive bias.