I chose to put this in GD as I’m not sure that there is a single answer to this question.
When debating the existence of God, I often see believers chastising non-believers for calling for scientific evidence for the existence of God. If this is correct, and the scientific method is incapable of showing God’s existence, how is it that the miracles of the New Testament, resurrection etc. could have happened? Surely these are testable by science?
Why can believers have it both ways?
Miracles mysteriously disappeared at about the same time that people began to view the world with a critical eye. No miracles = no testing of miracles.
You can’t prove the existence of a god or gods by scientific evidence, because any falsification you might try can always be met with “God did it that way.”
You can’t prove the non-existence of anything because you might not have looked far enough, or one will turn up tomorrow and prove you wrong.
That said, you can, by preponderance of evidence, strongly suggest that a supernatural entity exists or doesn’t exist. However, you might have to define what “god” means first, and the observation can become self-fulfulling.
As far as trying to prove that something written in a 2000yo book really happened without a shred of corroborating observation and no physical evidence, impossible.
How impossible? As a friend of mine used to say, “Pretty darn.”
The fact that some events in the Bible require supernatural abilities makes them less likely to have occurred than, say, a story about a man eating a fish. You are faced with an enormous amount of credulity required to accept them.
As Contrapuntal has already noted, “miracles” don’t seem to be happening today, and the ones that are examined fall apart; this has led to the “God is dead” philosophy. We are faced with two possibilities:[ul][li]They never happened, only reported by the gullible or made up by the pious, orTimes were different back then, but only for some people.[/ul]You decide.[/li]
They can’t. Are you saying they do, or they should?
The existence of God cannot be proven or disproved. Certain historical concepts in the Bible can have evidence for or against which makes certain conclusions very likely. There’s no way to prove or disprove the miracles attributed to Jesus in the Bible. If people are determined to believe they will believe in spite of evidence to the contrary. They will justify and rationalize their beliefs in some way.
Much of the individuals spiritual life is subjective and as such cannot really be approached with scientific method. Group belief is also a very powerful force in people. When a belief that is held by many people is challenged they often react as if they are being attacked and refuse to take a serious look at existing evidence.
IMHO we can challenge beliefs for which we have ample evidence. It isn’t easy and can take generations but eventually by simply working to get evidence into as many hands as possible we will see a shift in thinking.
God is supernatural. Science examines nature.
Nature is reality. Where does that leave God?
By reality you mean what we are capable of measuring at this time right?
Of course. Nothing is supernatural-we just haven’t measured it yet.
Then I guess that leaves God in the unmeasurable category doesn’t it?
No, it just means he isn’t measured yet, or he doesn’t exist.
I see that you are trying to “measure” god in this thread.
I will deny that assertion until I know what it means. 
So, how would you propose to test them?
How would you use science to test whether something that was claimed to have happened actually did happen a couple thousand years ago? That’s awfully far back for any kind of evidence to have lasted.
Were you proposing to scientifically test whether the kinds of things described were possible? An answer of “no” could be rebutted with either
(1) “You don’t know what conditions they occurred under well enough to replicate them,” or just
(2) “That’s why they’re called miracles: because they’re things that can’t normally happen, things that go against what’s scientifically possible. If they could happen normally, they wouldn’t need God.”
If you’re talking about scientifically examining miraculous events that are supposedly occuring today, I don’t see how you could prove or disprove God that way.
If you couldn’t find any miracles, or you tested one and found it to be not miraculous after all, that would still leave open the possibility of true miracles occuring elsewhere, or of a God who doesn’t do miracles nowadays. If you did find something that was apparently miraculous, how would you know that it didn’t have some explanation that you were unaware of, perhaps because it involved things that science hasn’t figured out yet. For that matter, would the existence of miracles necessarily entail the existence of God?
I disagree that nature is reality. In fact, nature emerges from a quantum world that is decidedly not real. I think that what is real must be essential, necessary, and eternal (nontemporal). The universe, as I see it, is nothing more than a probability distribution.
As, or maybe more, importantly, why do Christian believers feel compelled to cite miracles and the resurrection? They are “simply” manifestations of the supernatural in the natural world. It’s almost as if these manifestations, or interferences, constitute a type of empirical evidence that lends credence to their faith in the supernatural.
How is that not real?
I don’t think I fully explained myself correctly in the OP. Here’s my thoughts:
Science only measures physical phenomena. I’ve seen believers hide behind the fact that God is metaphysical as a way of getting around claims for scientific evidence. If God is metaphysical, how did he cause the resurrection, the feeding of the five thousand etc.?
Either God is physical or he is metaphysical. What rationale is there behind believers claiming that God is metaphysical and beyond scientific reproach when citing the resurrection as a tenet of their faith? Is this even philosophically sound?
“hide behind”?
I don’t know, maybe it’s something like the way an author can cause something to happen in a novel, without being part of the “physical” reality of the novel; or a computer programmer can cause something to happen in a video game without being in the computer. Are believers obliged to explain how God did something in order to assert that God did it?
I think your question is related to the mind-body problem in philosophy: anyone who believes that humans have a “spirit” or “soul” or “mind” that goes beyond the configuration of atoms in our physical brains is faced with the question of how an immaterial mind/spirit can influence a physical body.
How is what not real, math?
Also true. I suppose I would have been more accurate to say, if God exists , God is immeasurable by our current standards. It’s logical to think that in time all will be explained but it’s also logical to recognize that we don’t really know.
I agree that we face that question, but I don’t know why the answer would be difficult. If, as I posit, the universe is basically a mathematical expression, then we have the spirit influencing the atoms. Simply because the spirit is not corporeal does not imply some insurmountable disconnect. Just as a material man can influence a nonmaterial math problem, a spirit may simply manipulate a material brain. Atoms are just potentialities and possibilities. There’s no reason that what manipulates them must be physical.