Scientific interest in religion often focusses on the “puzzle of belief”: how
people develop and maintain religious beliefs despite a lack of evidence and
the significant costs that those beliefs incur. A number of researchers have
suggested that humans are predisposed towards supernatural thinking, with
innate cognitive biases engendering, for example, the misattribution of
intentional agency. Indeed, a number of studies have shown that nonbelievers
often act “as if” they believe. For example, atheists are reluctant to sell the very souls they deny having, or to angrily provoke the God they explicitly state does
not exist. In our own recent work, participants who claimed not to believe in
the afterlife nevertheless demonstrated a physiological fear response when
informed that there was a ghost in the room. Such findings are often interpreted
as evidence for an “implicit” belief in the supernatural that operates alongside
(and even in contradiction to) an individual's conscious (“explicit”) religious
belief. In this article, we investigate these arguably tenuous constructs more
deeply and suggest some possible empirical directions for further disentangling
implicit and explicit reasoning.