The Divine Conspiracy

Though it's been out for several years, I'm still working on finishing Dallas Willard's The Divine Conspiracy. I thought I'd post a few quotes from the book (in hopes of provoking some discussion).

One of the things I admire most about Willard is the presence he makes in the world of academia, which is often weighted with antagonism toward Christianity. Willard is a committed Evangelical Christian and a Philosophy professor at the University of Southern California.

"To believe something is to act as if it is so." (pg. 318)

"The negative 'answers' [concluding there is no evidence of God in the natural world] that now dominate our culture are mainly based on a socially enforced readiness to disbelieve. And those negative answers, which find no God in nature, really do need help from social conditioning." (pg. 330)

"But if this actually is God’s universe, the current lords of knowledge have made what is surely the greatest mistake in human history. Believing the world is flat or the moon is cheese would be nothing in comparison to their mistake. To believe that the current lords of 'knowledge' are right, on the other hand, is to omit the spiritual God and the spiritual life from the literally real. It is to take them to be illusions; and two or more centuries of 'advanced thinking' have now been devoted to showing that they are illusions. So the battle to identify our universe as God’s and our existence as part of his creation simply has to go on." (pg. 331)

“In the tradition in which I was brought up, scripture reading and prayer were the two main religious things one might do, in addition to attending services of the church. But I was not given to understand that these had to be practiced in a certain way if they were to make a real difference in one’s life.
In particular I did not understand the intensity with which they must be done, nor that the appropriate intensity required that they be engaged in for lengthy periods of undistracted time on a single occasion. Moreover, one’s life as a whole had to be arranged in such a way that this would be possible.” (pg. 356, emphasis my own)

"Suppose I am a pastor. If, truly, God did nothing in my church service, or in response to my efforts in ministry, how much would it really matter if the people in attendance still thought and spoke well of things and returned for the next service and brought their friends? I may be tempted to think I have to attract people to hear me but could get by without God." (pg. 202)