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[Macaroni]

What is the proof of God and Jesus committing miracles? And what is proof disproving their existence?

[jimwalton]

First of all, there is no philosophical argument or scientific experiment that conclusively disproves the possibility of miracles. Scientifically speaking, the odds of certain miracles occurring (such as the resurrection) may be infinity to one, but theologically speaking they are x:x. Miracles are outside of the scope of probability calculations. But realistically, the question is not so much "Can they occur?" but "Do they occur?" Anyone, including myself, will admit that scientists exclude the miraculous from their scientific work, which they are entitled to do. But that's because if a scientist tried to offer a miraculous explanation for something, he or she would no longer be doing science, but something else. Miracles are inadmissible as scientific evidence because they are unpredictable, not able to be compared with a control group, and unrepeatable for confirmatory studies.

As far as the proof of them, enough contemporary events have been documented that resemble the NT miracles closely enough to make it credible to believe that they also happened. These can be googled forever, where one will find evidence disparaging them, and evidence supporting them.

But on to your question. We all know that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and we all also know that the evidence surrounding Jesus' miracles (and other miracles of the Bible) is limited to the authors of the Bible, and there is no corroboration from extra-biblical historians about those events. So even if we are dealing with an otherwise reliable source (the writers of the Bible, in the opinion of Christians), we're still justified in being skeptical about their claims of extraordinary events.

The problem is that you are asking the wrong question of the wrong discipline. Science can really only work in a uniform environment that is predictable, repeatable, and (in this situation) controllable (a control group; an experimental group). Evidentiary demands require some sort of material remains that allow a phenomenon to be studied, or enough unequivocal testimony to render a phenomenon indubitable on any level. Both of these requirements are outside of the sphere of what we mean by "miracle." Miracles are not predictable (so the situation can't be intentionally studied before the event), reproducible (so the situation can't be tested again to confirm hypotheses), nor controllable (cannot isolate causal mechanisms).

In short, the bottom line is that knowledge is not one-dimensional. The methods of evidentiary scientific study are not applicable to much of the knowledge we know, including the occasion of miracles. Attempting to extend scientific evidence as the grounds of all knowledge is doomed to failure in many arenas, not just this one. To presume that anything remaining outside of science's scope fails to qualify as truth is not justified by science or any other argument, and is, in fact, self-contradictory.