God, to me, is the set of those true statements that we are unable to understand.

Isn't that basically just a restatement of the whole non-overlapping magisteria argument? Ie, Science talks about things we know, and religion talks about all the things that are also true, but unprovable.

Some assumptions there that should definitely not be accepted at face value:

1. Science is about talking.

2. Religion says true things.

3. It is reasonable to accept these things as true despite being unprovable.

Science is not: a body of information, a group of people, a way of speaking, or the use of technology. Science is a method of analyzing the unknown, which boils down to a simple rule: Theories are verified by evidence.

Yes, any sufficiently complicated axiomatic system will contain unprovable true statements. But we're not living in an axiomatic system, we're living in the universe, where the technical term for the class of statements which are fundamentally and forever unverifiable is "meaningless". That's why Einstein's theories, while elegant and useful, were not accepted until they made a risky prediction that came true. To paraphrase Popper, if a theory makes no risky predictions, then it might be an interesting story, but that's all it is.

Another way to put this is that the meaning of a proposition is the difference between two hypothetical universes, alike in every way, except that in one (A), the proposition is false, and in the other (B), it is true, and the necessary differences implied by this. This isn't all that crazy; whenever you start a statement with "That means...", this is what you're mentally doing, calculating the delta between the world with and the world without.

Take the statement "God exists." If there is not, and can never be, any observable difference between universes A and B, then that statement has no meaning, and we shouldn't even bother talking about it when we could be petting cats or folding socks.

But that's not the case, for most values of "God" that people talk about. A universe designed intentionally by a benevolent, omniscient, omnipotent fairy would very likely be very different from the one that fell together by random chance, in ways very much NOT outside our web of understanding.

the conquest of universal concepts of morality and faith over political, tribal, and primitive power systems -- the species learning what part of God-belief is critical to its survival and what is not

We don't get our morality from religion. If we did, then how would christian parents know that they're not supposed to stone their children? (It's not the law, either, because those laws were made mostly by christians, so how did the lawmakers know that stoning ought to be immoral?)

The common response is, It's not all meant to be taken literally, but if that's the case, how do you know which parts to take literally, unless you get your moral sense from somewhere else?

To the extent that truth exists and can be found, science--that is, making up logically coherent stories and then testing those stories against evidence--is the way to find it.

I include in that the very real human need for morality and the experiences commonly described as spirituality. If those types of experiences are valuable and psychologically useful, great; let's investigate and study them. There is a wealth of literature in the Buddhist tradition doing just that. (Buddhism has some warts, but it's always struck me as the least irrational religion, overall.)

The non-overlapping magisteria argument basically amounts to filling in any gaps in our knowledge with the sticky goo of religion to make ourselves feel better until science can come along and clean up the mess. But doesn't that just add friction to the progress of understanding? Is it really so torturous to just admit we don't know something, and live with it, letting it spur us on to more investigation?