The most ancient religion we know of, that of the ancient Mesopotamians, featured a war between the god Marduk and the god Tiamet, who symbolize light/darkness chaos/order etc, much in the way later religions do.
My personal belief is that the religions are all describing the same real phenomenon: the way the individual draws order out of chaos to create the world.
In the Mesopotamian myth Marduk (order/light) cuts up Tiamat (chaos/darkness) and casts her pieces across the universe, creating the world.
In the Judeo-Christian myth Yahweh separates the earth (order) and the heavens (chaos) to create the world.
I don't know of a religion that does not repeat this as a central theme.
Personally I see this as evidence that they were all describing the qualities that the ancient believers saw embodied in their worldly heroes and immortalized them through an oral tradition describing the modes of action (a dramatization) which made those heroes admirable, and those phenomena thus appear wherever there is an ancient myth.
> I don't know of a religion that does not repeat this as a central theme.
That's probably more because most major religions all arise from a rather small geographic region (the Abrahamic religions from the Middle East, Iranian religions (e.g., Zoroastrianism) from a little further west, and Hinduism, Buddhism, and other Indian religions are only a little further west than that), such that most religions you'd talk about in comparative religion essentially arise from the same place and broadly the same basic tenants.
When you start looking in creation mythologies from indigenous peoples outside of that small core region, you get far more diversity in the way they see creation. Native American creation myths tend to focus on a cyclical view of creation (i.e., this is not the first Earth to be created), for example, and there's no clean delineation between good and evil or order and chaos.
Birth and renewal is another theme that is central in many religions. In Christianity of course, Christ dies and comes back renewed. In Hinduism reincarnation is a foundational belief.
This theme appears in literature as well: Harry Potter sacrifices himself to the Basilisk (a snake, the dragon of chaos, who lives in the underworld beneath the school) in the Chamber of Secrets and is renewed (born again) by the phoenix (which is itself a mythological symbol of death and rebirth) at the end of the second book.
The themes aren't always enacted as part of the creation myth, but are often still present, and there's meaning in the reality that they appear so often and so consistently throughout myth and literature.
That being said, I will admit that I don't know enough about the Native American creation myths to comment on the way they approach good/evil and order/chaos. I would be very surprised if these themes were nowhere to be found within their myths, though, because the idea of the heroic individual who brings order out of chaos and defeats evil seems to be a human universal.
My personal belief is that the religions are all describing the same real phenomenon: the way the individual draws order out of chaos to create the world.
In the Mesopotamian myth Marduk (order/light) cuts up Tiamat (chaos/darkness) and casts her pieces across the universe, creating the world.
In the Judeo-Christian myth Yahweh separates the earth (order) and the heavens (chaos) to create the world.
I don't know of a religion that does not repeat this as a central theme.
Personally I see this as evidence that they were all describing the qualities that the ancient believers saw embodied in their worldly heroes and immortalized them through an oral tradition describing the modes of action (a dramatization) which made those heroes admirable, and those phenomena thus appear wherever there is an ancient myth.