If an author actually being X has no consequences apart from the professor believing that the author is "X", all consequences accrue to quoted beliefs and we have no reason to believe the unquoted form is meaningful or important. As for p-zombieness, it's not clear at this point in the sequence that this belief is meaningless rather than being false; and the negation of the statement, "people are not p-zombies", has phrasings that make no mention of zombiehood (i.e., "there is a physical explanation of consciousness") and can hence have behavioral consequences by virtue of being meaningful even if its intuitive "counterargument" has a meaningless term in it.

I would strongly recommend against the God Delusion. It's an extremely frustrating book to read as a theist: you start swearing at the book before you get out of the prologue.

Incidentally, I think that Mere Christianity is a bit outdated. Its whole argument from metaethics has kinda died with the advent of evolutionary psychology. The Screwtape Letters is far superior.