It is my view that, prior to Darwin's writing, there was little resistance to the idea that the world was created. For whatever reason, Darwin knocked that tradition into a cocked hat - not really his intention at the time.
At that time the world's press was drawn to the discovery of compelling proof of Noah's Ark being exposed on Turkey's Mount Ararat. There was a monastary on the lower slopes of Ararat that had collected artifacts from gleanings on the mountain. Many interesting items were documented.
Then an expedition climbed high on the mountain and apparently discovered what was believed to be remnants of a huge boat. Headlines exploded around the world and popular interest was generated.
Then Darwin's book was publicized and overnight all interest in the findings on Arafat were extinguished, never to be really rekindled. The power of the press reared its head. Subsequently a huge earthquake and landslide buried the monastery and formed the deep gash, the Ahora Gorge. Some claim that the splitting that formed the gorge divided the Ark structure in half. Photographic evidence is somewhat inconclusive.
The point is that discoveries on Arafat attract little world attention. U.S. astronaut James Irwin, of Apollo 15, climbed Ararat in 1982. Little attention was paid to the effort.
That’s an interesting side note to the search for the Ark. Since there was a landslide that destroyed the monastery (before the muslims got around to it) there is no proof they found anything outside of their claims.
If there was an ark run by some one named Noah, it was just one of dozens all around the world and would have participated in the worldwide floods with the melting of the ice caps, the subsequent comet strikes of 10800 BC, and the end of the Younger Dryas Age a thousand or so years later.
Back to Darwin: none of his postulates about evolution have proven true in real life and some are plain impossible. The biggy: there is no currently known way that one species can turn into another, no matter how many millions of years one waits. Nor can Darwin explain the Cambrian Explosion when the Earth transitioned from a virtual Snowball and went from almost no living creatures to multitudes of creatures everywhere in every ecological niche over a few million years.