In lieu of the sometimes fulfilling, often frustrating addiction to Lost, I've taken a chance on another mysterious fantasy drama this fall, NBC's Heroes. The premise isn't exactly groundbreaking -- a group of unlikely and unsuspecting average Joes discover that they have special powers and now must band together to save the world from villains with equal or greater abilities. We've read this comic book before.

But the story of this team of potentially super heroes is unveiled in a way that is both dramatic and fun, dark and ridiculous. Their mission, as we know it so far, is to stop an imminent nuclear attack against New York City that has been prophesied by at least two of our heroes. Again, not exactly novel territory -- heroes saving New York, how clever -- but the engaging cast and storylines manage to keep it fresh.

More intriguing than the show's plot, however, is an ever increasing tension between the concepts of evolution and "destiny." This is surely quite deliberate, and provides a framework that I suspect will define what the show is all about. On the one hand, the heroes are assumed to have been given their abilities through mindless natural selection. On the other, most of good guys have an unyielding sense that their powers were assigned for a great purpose, that they were called, somehow, as protectors of the world.

That is, perhaps, the underlying question in all superhero stories, though I don't know of any that have laid it out so vividly as this one. At the end of last night's episode, one of the main characters -- Mohinder Suresh, a professor out to learn the secrets of these gifted people -- claims: “Evolution is an imperfect and often violent process. Morality loses its meaning. The question of good and evil is reduced to one simple choice: survive or perish.”

The statement pegs the central challenge of a naturalistic worldview, and one of the most important philosophical arguments in favor of a designed universe: Morality is empty and useless without a foundation transcendent to nature. I don't know how Heroes will ultimately address this question, but it so far has displayed the problem quite profoundly. And it is certainly doing a fair job of showing the hopelessness and despair of a society with no Savior.