Correction Appended: Photo captions on this story misidentifed the First United Methodist Church.This story also omitted the title and first name of Rolf Bouma. Bouma is the director of the Center for Faith and Scholarship.

Studies show that professors are three times more likely to be atheists or agnostics than the rest of the population. Is a complete separation of church and state good for the University, or should you be worried about being indoctrinated by godless liberals?

1.

It's a brilliant Sunday morning, but the sunshine deceives. Step outside and the air is frigid, still below the freezing point. South University Avenue looks like a mirage in the windy cold. The winter just refuses to give up.

The detritus of our national day of alcohol abuse - pardon me, St. Patrick's Day - litters the streets and yards of campus. Cracked green knickknacks are blown about. Partially-filled beer cans roll down South U.

One block away, the Campus Chapel on 1236 Washtenaw Avenue opens its doors for Sunday service.

On campus, the sacred and profane maintain an uneasy peace. It's a fraught situation when the two intersect - not unlike running into your ex at the grocery store. You exchange quick smiles and dash away to the drain cleaner aisle where you study the labels for a good while.

2.

At the moment, there is something of an atheist revival going on. Books by notable atheists - including the "unholy trinity" of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett - are international bestsellers. Publications like Time, Wired and The New York Times have devoted their covers and yards of copy to the phenomenon.

"Dawkins doesn't know a thing about religion," said Brian Malley, a lecturer in the University psychology department's culture and cognition program. The lights in his office were off, and it was dark enough that one couldn't tell if he was being entirely serious. "There's reams of research about what religion is actually like."

He makes an important point. For his doctoral work, Malley studied the actual practices of Evangelical Christians at a local church and found that they don't always match up with the dictates of scripture. Sometimes they don't even believe what they think they believe. A great deal of personal interpretation often underlies their strong claims of biblical inerrancy.

In his popular class, "Why do people believe in gods?" Malley leads a tour of religious beliefs and the psychological landscape in which they evolved. Such a venture leads to a big idea: that humans, for better or worse, are evolved to believe. It isn't exactly a good Christian viewpoint.

Scott Atran - a visiting professor of psychology and public policy at the University as well as the subject of a New York Times Magazine cover story earlier this month called "Darwin's God" - is a figure engaged in active debate with the new atheists.

Atran - unlike Dawkins who wants to convince you of the silliness in believing - wants to figure out why people believe what they believe.

The new atheists savage the religious point of view by rebutting the more unpleasant portions of monotheist texts. But combing for inconsistencies and non-sequiturs in the Holy Scripture won't tell you a thing about the value and ubiquity of religion, or the way in which it affects the lives of the majority of the human population.

Spirituality is felt, not thought. And the interactions between people's lives and their beliefs create infinitely greater complexity than the new atheists can handle. Religion imparts a texture to the lives of these people, one that is utterly glossed over in hardnosed scriptural analysis. In this way, the new atheists may be some of the strictest biblical literalists of all.

3.

Amid the scholarly explorations of religiosity, a more pressing issue in the culture wars might be the reverse: the religiosity of scholars.

The stereotype of the university as a bastion of liberal elites has been examined in surveys of faculty members conducted in the past few years.

The Spirituality and Higher Education survey conducted by UCLA found that 81 percent of faculty in the country identify themselves as "spiritual beings," although that drops to 65 percent when faculty are asked whether they identify themselves as "religious."

A different study from the Harvard Divinity School showed that faculty members had a 20 percent incidence of atheist and agnostics, much greater than the 7 percent of the general population.

And as for the students of these professors, about 10 percent identified themselves as atheists or agnostics.

The plot thickens when the survey data are sliced up according to the reputation of the institution. Universities, like this one, ranked in the top 50 by U.S. News and World Report had the highest proportion of atheists - 36 percent.