Evidently Pagans are talking about this today, so:

I don’t believe in the gods, I have committed to conceiving of the Cosmos in terms of the gods.

The Cosmos has deep, pervasive, recurring patterns which show up as gods when encountered by the human frame.

Put another way:

I don’t really believe in the gods, oh no, I am just PRETENDING — pretending VERY HARD — to believe in them. Because it turns out that this works REALLY well.

Put another way:

I don’t believe in Hermes, just like I don’t believe in Newtonian mechanics.

Newtonian mechanics are wrong; the Cosmos is not built that way.

But if you pretend to believe in Newtonian mechanics, you can do magic. And that counts for something.

Put another way:

If you commit to pretending to believe in the gods, things will happen attributable either to them shifting the world in subtle ways or to you shifting your behavior in subtle ways.

The latter explanation is more parsimonious.

At first.

More discussion over here https://twitter.com/miniver/status/1180997437172809728

I mean, all this talk of “believing” in the gods seems very Protestant.

Keep that out of my Pagan culture, please.