Are Richard Dawkins' views evolving with time?

Melanie Phillips has written a cracking review of the second debate between Richard Dawkins and Oxford mathematician, John Lennox. Apparently, Dawkins began the debate in Oxford by saying:

'a serious case could be made for a deistic God.'

Now that sounds less like his militant atheism of old, and more like the posters now ubiquitous around London that declare: 'There's Probably No God'. As Phillips comments:

'This was surely remarkable. Here was the arch-apostle of atheism, whose whole case is based on the assertion that believing in a creator of the universe is no different from believing in fairies at the bottom of the garden, saying that a serious case can be made for the idea that the universe was brought into being by some kind of purposeful force. A creator.'

Indeed, as Phillips notes, it undermines Dawkins' previous assertion that:

...all life, all intelligence, all creativity and all ‘design’ anywhere in the universe is the direct or indirect product of Darwinian natural selection...Design cannot precede evolution and therefore cannot underlie the universe.

But then, why should we expect logical consistency and rational argument from an Oxford atheist?