William Lane Craig seems to have a very serious problem with falsely claiming his opponents really agree with him. I gave some examples here, and have know about examples from Biblical scholarship for awhile, but I just stumbled across a new one. It comes from no less august a platform than a cover story in /Christianity Today/:

1. Everything that exists has an explanation of its existence, either in the necessity of its own nature or in an external cause.
2. If the universe has an explanation of its existence, that explanation is God.
3. The universe exists.
4. Therefore, the explanation of the universe’s existence is God.
…
Premise (2) might at first appear controversial, but it is in fact synonymous with the usual atheist claim that if God does not exist, then the universe has no explanation of its existence.

I tried to think of a fancy way to say this, but I couldn’t: Craig’s lying. Of course, many atheists doubt whether there’s an explanation for the universe’s existence, but this is usually because they see the problems with the very idea of having such an explanation. They don’t deduce it from the fact that God does not exist.

Craig is enough of a logic-chopper that he might claim they agree with premise (2) if you use “if” in the special sense sometimes employed in logic, that an “if” claim is true just in case it doesn’t have both a true “if” clause and a false “then” cause. This “material conditional” sense of premise (2) is something every atheist has to agree with insofar as they thing God doesn’t exist, but this concession is won only by abandoning the assumption that there is some genuine connection between the “if” and the “then” parts of an “if” claim. In this sense it is also true that “If the Earth is the fourth planet from the sun, then 2 + 2 = 5,” and “If I have tentacles, then I own a Dell laptop.”