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I think your analysis of the issue is correct here. I hold to the view that science is science, and religion is religion. The question of whether God exists is not one of science, but of religion, of faith. So, of the two, I am closer to your second than your first. (Although I believe that it is perhaps an ironic truth that the people who you will find who view evolution in the first sense you set out, are the biblical literalists/Young Earth Creationists. They just don't believe in it, but that is how they view it. Vulgar, indeed.)

In fact, if I were to describe my religious feelings currently, I would say "agnostic" in recognition of the fact that you cannot prove either the existence of God nor the non-existence of God, nor that any one faith is true. But my feelings on the religion question has changed. (The aforementioned biblical literalists/Young Earth Creationists on these threads are to thank, in part, for my whithering faith, as their argument that evolution and a strict reading of Genesis (and therefore, in their minds, Christianity) are incompatible has some traction. So I jettison Genesis.)

Where does the human sense of God come from? The story of a deaf and dumb Mexican laborer who had no language provides an insight.

For most of the man's life, everything was pictures and memory. For example, he did not understand the word or concept "green," but green paper was good because it meant US folding money and the protection of a green card; and green, official looking clothes were terrifying because they were associated with the border patrol and INS.

Special education opened the man's world through sign language. He was found to have an intrinsic sense of dignity, becoming greatly offended when a teacher tried to pay for a lunch that he had promised to pay for in gratitude. Yet the very idea of abstract rules of law or justice proved utterly elusive.

Remarkably, the man nevertheless seemed to immediately grasp the concept of God, as if it was preexisting in his mind. His explanation of God is simple yet insightful: God was "unseen greatness." His deaf and dumb fellow students of similar simplicity also endorsed the concept as if it were self-evidently true.

Does God exist? We are not permitted to or be capable of knowing either way with provable certainty. But we know that we are surrounded by "unseen greatness" even if we cannot tell if it is in a world created by God or by the operation of unconscious and purely material processes of unknown origin.

To me, it is absurd to try to take Genesis as if it were a science treatise, but hard line fundamentalists and atheists both seem to insist upon doing so. The core teaching of Genesis is both irrefutable and unprovable: that we are the deliberate creation by the conscious act of a supreme being. And no one in this life can definitively show that to be true or not true.