It may be slightly more complicated and you are more describing areligious people than atheist which specifically refers to a god (Theo). It's also not unusual for an atheist to adhere to scientific explanations for reality such as the Big Bang which though some evidence supports and other evidence calls into question, nonetheless inspires a sort of faith in the conclusion that everything exploded out of one point of nothingness, completely counterintuitive since for example we didn't presumably use up all the nothingness and so it could happen an infinite number of times or you must have faith that it could only happen once.

Or one might believe or have an opinion that life resulted from random interactions to evolve us chatting on Medium but it couldn't have evolved God or many gods over eternity using the exact same process. So there is similar cognitive dissonance in both atheism and religion since both pick and choose what to believe out of a vast set of unknowns.