ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on Lucian of Samosata, an author of the second century CE, who is known for his sceptical or even critical attitude towards religion. Nearly a century ago, Jane Harrison highlighted this connection in an article on the influence of Darwinism on the study of religions, stating at the very beginning, that the title might well have been 'The Creation by Darwinism of the Scientific Study of Religions'. So Lucian describes the belief in supernatural intentional agents and the fascination of counter-intuitive concepts all of them known so well from the cognitive science of religion, as, for instance, from the list of 'Intuitive-knowledge-domain violations' given by Pascal Boyer and Justin Barrett. One could say that Lucian's questions have been answered by the cognitive science of religion. However, the study of religion must not neglect the hermeneutical task of understanding the content of the various religious concepts themselves apart from the way of conceptualization.
