NBC’s Heroes and a Christian Response … a warm up.

NBC’s television show “Heroes” is pretty good, though I have to say that I agree in many respects with this guy who has grown tired of some of the plot elements.  I still have more hope, though, and I especially like watching deep philosophy play out on the TV screen.  In particular, I enjoy watching the evolutionary world view sink its claws into the imagination of Americans who would otherwise never think about it.

In this series, we are given to believe that evolutionary processes have allowed a class of people to emerge with special gifts like mind reading, flying, instantaneous regrowth, memory stealing, time travel, etc.  But at no point does the series try to explain how exactly a genetic mutation can allow a human to fly.  It isn’t like they sprout wings.  They just go, like Superman.  We have here the curious mental exercise of imagining that evolution can produce literally any phenomena we might imagine- including what would otherwise have been described as supernatural- while not bothering to explain what the actual mechanism is in terms of the laws of physics.

It is almost as if we are being prepped to be direct witnesses to a miracle and yet still prefer a naturalistic explanation (2 Thessalonians 2:9-12).

In the meantime, the characters themselves are mystified about their powers and we occasionally see arguments about the source of the ‘gifts.’  Is it God?  In the latest episode, Maya terms Sylar/Gabriel (I’m sure ‘Gabriel’ is unintentional) as a gift from God when of course we know that Sylar is a major punk.   We are led to believe, I guess, that God is perfectly happy with a woman being able to kill people at a distance when yucky stuff comes out of her eyes.  And in an episode previously,  the argument is that there can’t be a God if all these bad things are happening.  Ok, but is there no counter-argument?

There are all sorts of interesting questions lurking behind all of this but the series lacks one critical element that would help diffuse the idea that we’re just being given atheistic propaganda:  a devout and intelligent and educated theist to serve as a counter-weight and counter-explanation to rival other explanations offered in the series.  Even Carl Sagan managed to muster one up in his book Contact, though naturally he couldn’t resist making religious nutjobs his main bad guys.  Because all religious people who really believe in God are nutjobs, didn’t you know?

Anyway, I hope to try to expand on these themes as the season progresses.   In the main, I do enjoy the show, but then I also know a little bit about those questions that are lurking underneath.

But personally, I’m starting to think Heroes is getting tapped out.  I am enjoying Journeyman because it is dealing with some of these issues in a more respectable way.  Just my opinion.