Fill her role? Fictional characters? We have had hundreds of documented princesses that were real people hell we have a couple to this day i’m sorry twilight but you need to do a bit more research.

We have magic,we just call it science and chemistry and if we had magic in the literal sense we would have less technology.oh and ponies are social creatures and they know their god exist,which is celestia,they still have evil but it’s more quality than quantity.

WE HAVE GOD

It’s had its ups and downs…

To answer your question Twilight, the world would be essentially the same with magic. If magic on Earth were like magic in Equestria, it wouldn’t be supernatural. It would be PHYSICS. So a world with Equestria style magic would not be very different. If anything, religion and superstition would be more confusing and fragmented. Which makes for a great story, but that’s another matter…

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. That said, science does have its limitations and if you cannot replicate an occurrence, or anomaly, it cannot be properly studied or explained. Their are some questions science will never be able to answer, things it will never be able to truly explain.  
And there may well be magic. But until I see a buckin’ good logical argument for its existence, I’m discounting its existence. I’d call witchcraft another matter though, and I consider the two very different beasts.

To be honest, I just copied the images from the Wikipedia page.

>post sun deities  
>forgets Amaterasu
 
*downvotes

Magic is real, it’s just stuff we havn’t explained yet.

It’s furthered the proliferation and branching of religions, superstitions and their offshoots as we try to explain phenomena we don’t understand with imagined creatures which we think we do… sort of, when the priestly types permit it, anyway. That’s a gross simplification, because we also use religions to attempt to understand the moral and ethical sphere (when that really varies by culture and individual), and because we use them as cultural markers for divisions between the tribes (to the dismay of us ’eathens and infidels out ‘ere), but the mechanisms are similar.
 
Perhaps ponies have a humanistic - ponistic? - morality derived from their individual needs and desires, and all balanced perfectly with the needs of society and the betterment of ponykind. If you can just ask Princess Celestia about, well, celestial mechanics, or manipulate the natural world harmoniously using magic; if ponies no longer war with one another, then I can see Equestria being less fractured than our own societies (or as Discord would say: more boring)
 
Or perhaps I’m deluding myself, and the problems we see are systemic, part of the nature of social groupings over time, and cannot be resolved either by humans or by ponies. THANKS FOR THE DOWNERTHINK, OP!

@EricNeoMatrix  
Actually religion (christians at least) generally split anomalies into Divine and Daemonic.
 
Wonders performed by Jesus and various saints are based on Gods good will while non religious wonders (magic) are demonic in nature and considered evil.
 
Also ask your local priest about Jesus performing “magic” and he will either lecture you about it, or if he’s one of those firebrand preachers he will just bitchslap you just for using the words Magic and Jesus in the same sentence.

No magic? Bullshit, I just cast a magic missile at this driver who was talking on the phone earlier. Sure it caused a 10 car pileup and I think I saw the driver’s arm not currently on the driver, but it was worth it.

Depends on what your definition of magic is.

People still think there is magic in our world. That’s why religion exists; it runs on aupernatural events that never actually happened.

im gonan refrain from this question

I have no idea!

Well, that’s actually a very tough question, Twilight. However, in short, it goes like this:
 
Good  
Good  
Bad  
Good  
Bad  
BAD  
BAD  
Good  
Good  
Stopped caring  
Hinderance

The absence of magic hasn’t stopped people from still believing it exists.
 
Also, please don’t remind me Celestia doesn’t exist here… bums me out.

yea it turned half the people on the planet into geniuses!

Who says there is no magic in the human universe!  
LIES!