Atheist Sam Harris famously claims to have no patience with philosophically or theologically developed concepts of God; instead, he wants to attack the "real God" in whom most Americans believe. This God is a benevolent grandfather in the sky, so to speak -- the kind of God, for example, who intervenes in football games to make sure that your team wins. So there is a popular concept, held by those who neither reflect upon nor attempt to defend their idea of God, and there is theological concept, at which one arrives when one begins reflecting upon and defending the idea of God. To simply define the terms of the discussion in such a way that "God" means "God-without-any-possible-defense" may score rhetorical points, but gets us nowhere. It is easy to attack embarrassments like the Creation Museum, but it is much harder to articulate a minimally reasonable atheist response to the strong claims of the Christian theological tradition.
The crucial personal move, though, is to ask myself how often I do the same thing. How often do I object to precisely the version of an idea that has no defenders? A straw man may have many adherents, but it is the steel man, defended by those who take a reflective and developed approach to the idea, that is the legitimate target of critique.
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