Nope. Proof Of Work is essential in making Bitcoin work in the first place. It acts as a consensus mechanism among nodes to decide which are the transactions to be accepting and considered as valid.
(warning: I may be incredibly dense here, treat me like the slow but sincere child in the playground)
I never quite got why PoW makes one possible chain more valid than others? Comparing chains would make it possible to track it back to the divergence, right? And aren't there timestamps in place that can then determine which chain was 'diverged' last, hence would be the copy?