> Does that not mean that every grateful person acknowledges God's existence, at least implicitly?
No. It means that the emotion of gratefulness isn't always a simple reduction to what you have there. Similarly, I think thwave who replied to you is also wrong. The emotion doesn't have to always follow such a simplified framework or be legibly caused. Of course it has to have some causal chain, but I think the legibility could be as opaque as "X is grateful for Y because Z suggested that maybe they should be" where Z didn't have anything to do with Y, Y doesn't necessarily do much for X, and so on. It doesn't make the emotion of gratefulness any less valid. I expect the ways the emotion could come about is varied enough to avoid these simplifications.
No. It means that the emotion of gratefulness isn't always a simple reduction to what you have there. Similarly, I think thwave who replied to you is also wrong. The emotion doesn't have to always follow such a simplified framework or be legibly caused. Of course it has to have some causal chain, but I think the legibility could be as opaque as "X is grateful for Y because Z suggested that maybe they should be" where Z didn't have anything to do with Y, Y doesn't necessarily do much for X, and so on. It doesn't make the emotion of gratefulness any less valid. I expect the ways the emotion could come about is varied enough to avoid these simplifications.