The people in my world have been known to breed corn, potatoes, rice, and grains to get the best traits. There has also been some minimal dog breeding (although nothing like today). So the average person already understands that the attributes of plants and animals can change over time. It terms of religion, there are some religions that may be better suited to accepting evolution, such as those without a "creation" story. There are many people who believe that all things are interconnected (animism) or that spiritual energy binds us to the world, but there are no deities.

Sitting in your modern ontology founded on the faith that nature reveals deep order behind the appearance of random caprice, and then assuming that you could get modern science faster by removing the antecedent belief that she does so because she answers to the will of an ordering God, is a mistake. It's a very popular, high prestige mistake.

I disagree, but to each their own.

@gs I am not so sure TBH - in many cultures, the randomness of nature is tied to the fact that the God's or God weren't entirely rational. Crops failing? Maybe Zeus was upset at the quality of your offering or maybe something happened in his temple he disapproved of. I think that the idea that nature is ordered is a retcon into a priori religious belief.

I think religions like Christianity have been tinkering with their approach to nature to try to make it fit from the beginning. The problem of evil and especially "evil" in the natural world has required a great deal of fiddling with demons and devils (and snakes).

@TheDemonLord Science started as an attempt to better understand God by examining His creation. As Hume et al. have pointed out, the modern understanding that there is a constant and intelligible underlying order to the universe is neither obvious nor necessarily true without the Judeo-Christian assumption of a rational and personal God.

@TheDemonLord re: many cultures, yes. Most gods of most cultures are/were capricious and imply (or are inferred from) capricious nature, and belief in such a nature (the gods being important only in what the lead one to believe about nature) is likely a barrier to scientific thought. \

Zeus (et al) is a good example. Greek polytheism didn't have a creator god. Origins were natural processes or analogous to natural processes: Earth was primordial, she bore Sky spontaneously, Sky impregnated her, and all that lives is the result. This didn't help them be any less wrong about origins than anybody else.

Re: Religion- your view is very much not a view supported by evidence. For the vast majority of history, people did not see a conflict between science and religion, and this is only a relatively modern phenomenon. Moreover, the vast majority of inquiry through history has been done by religious persons, who simply did not turn their brains off and declare, "God did it." whenever they saw something they didn't understand. Malthus, who directly inspired Darwin, was a clergyman. Gregor Mendel was a monk.

@InHocSigno - Interesting notion - and I dont disagree that there were influential scientists who viewed science as getting closer to God - my view is, however, that Science was an outgrowth of Maths, which showed that there was some repeatable order in the universe.

@David - I understand your point - but for example - Heliocentrism and Galileo and the Catholic Church. Whilst there were definitely religious scientists, that is more because the population was almost exclusively religious. Furthermore, most scientific discoverers did not interfere with Religious teaching per se.

It is interesting that some of the early observations that evolution is based on came from a monk. Mendel.

@David We're not quite sure how much people saw religion back then as what we understand as religion now. It could be they were way less fanatical than we are, comparativley.

@TheDemonLord Relative to your comment about Galileo, the Church did not oppose Galileo because he was a heliocentrist; quite the opposite, it had explicitly endorsed his project to compare the different astronomical systems (incl. heliocentrism). They opposed him because (a) he went out of his way to insult the Church and (b) he presented heliocentrism in a doctrinaire style, skipping hypothesis and testing and going straight to presenting it as Scientific Fact™. While this later turned out to be the case, it was unproven at the time.

@TheDemonLord (cont.) Were someone to do something similar in the modern era, secular academia would have a roughly similar response (minus the house arrest and with a lot more public shaming.)

That said, I 100% agree with the importance of fossil records. Without them, Evolution vs Creation would be a purely philosophical debate.

@TheDemonLord "Science was an outgrowth of Math, which showed that there was some repeatable order in the universe" <- There is no evidence that it happened in this order, the written record for Math goes back several millennia prior to the first recorded system for scientific study, and the Egyptians, who pioneered Western math, had just as capricious of gods as the other Western Pagan civilizations. In contrast, there is a lot of evidence of scientists choosing to pursue thier discoveries for religious reasons after the religions changed to support a more orderly view of the universe.

@Nosajimiki - Yes, Maths came first, then Science came second - that is what I said. Science came from Maths - specifically during the Golden age of Islam, then to the Renaissance Scientists.

@David There's a slight problem with your concept of "religious people" doing this, which is that there was no alternative to being religious if you wanted any form of education. Whatever country you were in, the local church was the absolute gatekeeper to all education. Whether you believed or not, you needed to say the words.

@Graham - That is a very fair point TBH.

@David ... It also ignores the fact that becoming a monk or clergyman was not a choice to dedicate yourself to your faith as it is today. Back then, it was a career choice in a branch of politics with equal or greater power than kings and aristocracy. Well-to-do families would traditionally have the firstborn going into the aristocracy and inheriting the title and land, the second-born going into the military, and the third-born going into a significant role in the church.