Well, sure, because there were people out there trying to get rid of God. Think about it: if God exists, then we are beholden to Him, and if we are beholden to Him, maybe we should obey His commandments, which a lot of people don’t really want to do.
Not to mention the allure being gods ourselves...
The reality is that materialist evolution is impossible, as Darwin noted, because of the complexity. We are relying on random mutations, which are usually bad, and we are relying on multiple complementary, but random and good, mutations to occur in the same being. And we are relying on this having happened an untold number of times in order to bring about everything we see around us.
This is why I agree with the scientist, whose name unfortunately I did not catch and have never been able to find, who said that he realized it took more faith to believe in evolution than to believe in God.
Bkmk