Conrad's heroes in a world without a god

As the plot "thickens" in Conrad's Victory, the smarmy hotelier Schomberg gets an idea: He's completely terrified by the story Ricardo tells him about how he and his associate in crime, "plain Mr. Jones," got set up in a gambling operation - they're now operating a small illegal casino in Schomberg's hotel - and he makes it clear that they will readily kill anyone who gets in their way - he gives a rather frightening account as to how easy it is to break someone's neck, "snap," and they go limp - that word - snap - reverberates in Schomberg's petty mind (reminding me of the phrase "a drop of 20 feet" - I may not have it exactly - that resonates through The Secret Agent). So Schomberg, very eager to have these guys out of his hotel yet frightened about confronting them in any way, steers them toward the tiny island on which Heyst lives in solitude - or, not exactly in solitude because he ran off with the English woman musician whom Schomberg had set his sites on - tells Ricardo Heyst is a long-time thief and has plenty of money and no protection. Ricardo, against his better judgment, can't help but be interested. We know that everything S. said was a lie - and in part 3 of Victory we join, for the first time, Heyst on his island. This section begins oddly, for Conrad, with quite a bit of reflective back story, as Heyst, enjoying his solitude, thinks back on his last meeting with his father, a famous philosopher who espoused a rigid atheism: though Heyst does not in any obvious way appear to be his father's disciple, perhaps his aimless wandering of the South Seas is a parable for the aimless life of mankind in a world without a divine presence. He is alone in the world - and that feeling of solitude, the actual yearning for solitude, may represent the moral and social condition of the first generation of Europeans to recognize what JH Miller called "the disappearance of God" - to be replaced by what? Commerce? Adventure? Treasure-hunting? Exploitation of less-developed lands and people?