References
[Editor’s notes are in blue.]

* The title refers to Nathaniel Branden’s lecture “The Concept of God,” from his lecture series “The Basic Principles of Objectivism.” That lecture is fully transcribed in his book The Vision of Ayn Rand: The Basic Principles of Objectivism (Gilbert, Ariz.: Cobden Press, 2009), chapter 4. Partial and perhaps complete audios seem to be available throughout the Internet, especially here. See also R.A. Childs, “The Epistemological Basis of Anarchism,” Note 19.

[26] AS [Atlas Shrugged] 388bb-dd, 460m-r [paperback] (411hhj-kk, 489dd-ii) [hardback].

[27] AS 938ss-939a [paperback] (1012o-v) [hardback].

[28] WIAR [Nathaniel and Barbara Branden, Who Is Ayn Rand? (Paperback Library, 1964) 18 (16-17) [hardback; (New York: Random House, 1962)].
  What answers were given to these criticisms by the defenders of capitalism? Consider the statements of two of its most famous advocates, John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer.
  Mill’s essay On Liberty is generally regarded as one of the classic defenses of the rights of the individual. But individual rights is precisely the concept that Mill does not support. His ethical standpoint is that of Utilitarianism. In On Liberty, he argues that society should leave men free. But as justification for his position, he projects an essentially collectivist premise: the premise that the group should permit the individual to be free because that will allow him best to serve its interests — thus implying that man does not in fact have the right to freedom, but is, morally, the property of the collective. Not astonishingly, Mill ended his life as a socialist.
  Spencer defended capitalism by means of spurious analogies to animals in a jungle and “the survival of he fittest” — which implied a complete misrepresentation of the nature of capitalism, one that was thoroughly in accord with the views of its enemies. An animal’s method of survival is not man’s; men do not survive by fighting over a static quantity of meat (or wealth); their rational interests are not at war; they do not prosper at one another’s expense and sacrifice; men survive by producing the values, the goods, their life requires. What was Spencer’s ultimate moral justification for a free-market economy? Not the rights of the individual — but the purification of the race; the “weeding out of the unfit” in alleged accordance with the principles of evolution; that is, the good of the collective, of the human species.

FNI 37 [For the New Intellectual (New York: Signet, 1961)].
  Herbert Spencer, another champion of capitalism, chose to decide that the theory of evolution and of adaptation to the environment was the key to man’s Morality — and declared that the moral justification of capitalism was the survival of the species, of the human race; that whoever was of no value to the race had to perish....

[29] L. [Leonard] Peikoff, “Dogmatism, Pragmatism and Nazism” 9/5/4g-5f, 7d. [References of this form refer to The Objectivist Newsletter, so that volume 9, number 5 would be May 1970. After volume 4, the name of the publication was The Objectivist. The page numbers for the latter are those of the original format, not those in the bound volume.]
  Pragmatism is the form of voluntarist anti-intellectualism, which declares ... thought is strictly an action-oriented function to be measured by it “practical” results.... [An] idea is defined as “true” if and to the extent that it “works,” i.e., enables men to achieve in practice whatever goals they have.... “‘The true,’ [says William James,] to put it very briefly, is only the expedient in the way of our thinking, just as ‘the right’ is only the expedient in the way of our behaving.” ...
  Knowing their ideological background and context, one would expect the Fascists and Nazis to embrace the pragmatist philosophy eagerly. And so they did....
  ... Mussolini ... made a point of giving James part of the credit for the development of Fascism....
  As Goebbels put it: “Important is not what is right but what wins.”

L. Peikoff, “Nazism versus Reason” 8/11/3f [November 1999].
  Thus, for instance, Nietzsche on truth: “The falseness of an opinion is not for us any objection to it.... The question is, how far an opinion is life-furthering, life-preserving, species-preserving, perhaps species-rearing....

[30] William James, “Pragmatism’s Concept of Truth ” (lecture VI of Pragmatism, reprinted in Essays in Pragmatism, page 170, [The essay is available on-line from The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods, vol. 4, No. 6 (Mar. 14, 1907), the quoted passage being on page 150.]

[31] L. Peikoff, “Dogmatism, Pragmatism and Nazism” 9/4,5 [April and May 1970].

[32] A. Rand, “What Is Capitalism?” 4/12/55ff [December 1965; the page number refers to the bound volume of The Objectivist Newsletter, unlike other page references] & CUI 23 [Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (New York: New American Library, 1946-1966); the hardback page reference is page 14].
  The objective theory holds that the good is neither an attribute of #&147;things in themselves” nor of man’s emotional states, but an evaluation of the facts of reality by man’s consciousness according to a rational standard of value. (Rational, in this context means: derived from the facts of reality and validated by a process of reason.)

A. Rand, “What Is Capitalism?” 4/12/56e & CUI 23 [See above Note. The page reference for the hardback page reference for Capitalism is page 15].

[33] Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (Oxford UP, 1976; paperback 1978).
  Michael Gregory and Anita Silvers, eds., Sociobiology and Human Nature: an interdisciplinary critique and defense (Jossey Bass, 1978).
  Arthur L. Caplan, ed., The Sociobiology Debate (Harper & Row, 1978; hardback and paperback).

[34] N. Branden, “IAD: The moral meaning of risking one’s life” 3/4/15 dd, gg, kk [April 1964; the title James has used is the title that appears in the table of contents for The Objectivist Newsletter. The item itself carries the title “In the context of Objectivist ethics, what is the justification for knowingly risking one’s life?”].
  The Objectivist ethics holds “man’s life” or “the life appropriate to a rational being” as its standard of value. But this does not mean that, in any value choice, one’s only or foremost concern should be immediate, physical self-preservation. Such a policy would be incompatible with the standard of man’s life.
  ... It is in the name of the life proper to man that a rational person may be willing to die — not as treason to his life, but as the only act of loyalty possible to him....
  The man who, in any and all circumstances, would place his physical self-preservation above any other value, is not a lover of life, but an abject traitor to life — to the human mode of life — who sees no difference between the life proper to a rational being and the life of a mindless vegetable. His treason is not that he values his life too much, but that he values it too little.

AS 940bb-hh (1014c-8 [hardback].
  All that which is proper to the life of a rational being is the good. all that which destroys it is the evil. Man’s life, as required by his nature, is not the life of a mindless brute, but the life of a thinking being — not life by means of force or fraud, since there’s only one price that pays for man’s survival: reason.

[35] N. Branden, “IAD: Demonstration and irrationality” 2/7/27c [July 1963; James has used the page number and the title from the Objectivist Newsletter bound volume table of contents. The title in the issue is “How does one persuade a person who refuses to accept reason or logical demonstration?”].
  ... that man is a being of volitional consciousness and, therefore, that one cannot compel man to think or to be rational.

N. Branden, “The Objectivist Theory of Volition,” 5/1/9e [January 1966; there is a parallel passage in Branden, The Psychology of Self-Esteem (New York; Bantam, 1969); page 39].
  Man is not rational automatically; he is aware of the fact that his mental processes may be appropriate or inappropriate to the task of correctly perceiving reality....

N. Branden, “The Objectivist Theory of Volition,” 5/1/10 [January 1966; there is a parallel passage in Self-Esteem, page 40].
  The capacity of conceptual functioning is innate; but the exercise of this capacity is volitional.

[36] N. Branden, “Emotions and Values,” 5/5/3d [May 1966; there is a parallel passage in Self-Esteem, page 67].
  Like rationality, ir rationality is a concept that is not applicable to animals; it is applicable only to man.

A. Rand, “Intro. to Obj. Epistemology,” 5/10/5b [October 1966] and IOE 58 Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology (monograph published by The Objectivist Inc., 1966, 1967; page 43); parallel passage in the Second Expanded edition (New York; Mentor 1979), page 44].
  “Rational,” in this context [defining man as a rational animal], does not mean “acting invariably in accordance with reason” it means “possessing the faculty of reason.”

N. Branden, “Self-Esteem, ” 6/3/2h [March 1967; parallel text in Self-Esteem, page 112].
  Man is the one living species who is able to reject, sabotage and betray his own means of survival, his mind.

A. Rand, VOS 22e [The Virtue of Selfishness (New York: Signet, 1964), page 22].
  Man is the only living species that has the power to act as his own destroyer — and that is the way he has acted through most of his history.

AS 923n-t, gg-jj (994ff-ll, 995d-g [hardback]).
  He thought of all the living species that train their young in the art of survival, the cats who teach their kittens to hunt, the birds who spend such strident effort on teaching their fledglings to fly — yet man, whose tool of survival is the mind, does not merely fail to teach a child to think, but devotes the child’s education to the purpose of destroying his brain, of convincing him that thought is futile and evil, before he has started to think....
  Men would shudder, the thought, if they saw a mother bird plucking the feathers from the wings of her young, then pushing him out of the nest to struggle for survival — yet that was what they did to their children.

AS 939ff-940o (1031f-ll [hardback]).
  A plant must feed itself in order to live.... But a plant has no choice of action ...: it acts automatically to further its life; it cannot act for its own destruction.
  An animal is equipped for sustaining its life ... with automatic safety and no power of choice, it is unable to ignore its own good, unable to decide to choose the evil and act as it own destroyer.
  Man has no automatic code of survival.... An instinct of self-preservation is precisely what man does not possess.... A desire is not an instinct.... And even man’s desire to live is not automatic.... Man must obtain his knowledge and choose his actions by a process of thinking, which nature will not force him to perform. Man has the power to act as his own destroyer — and that is the way he has acted throughout most of his history.
  A living entity that regarded its means of survival as evil, would not survival. A plant that struggled to mangle its roots, a bird that fought to break its wings would not remain for long in the existence they affronted. But the history of man has been a struggle to deny and to destroy his mind.

[37] Aristotle, Politics I, 1252b 30.

[38] A. Rand, “Intro. to Objectivist Epistemology,” 5/12/2f [December 1966] & IOE 73-74 [Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology (monograph published by The Objectivist Inc., 1966, 1967; page 52); parallel passage in the Second Expanded edition (New York; Mentor 1979), page 55].
  One can study what exists and how consciousness functions; but one cannot analyze (or “prove”) existence as such, or consciousness as such. These are irreducible primaries. (An attempt to prove them is self-contradictory: it is an attempt to “prove” existence by means of non-existence, and consciousness by means of unconsciousness.