Faith & Miracles

Do miracles "prove" the existence of God?

There is a passage in the Gospel of Mark in which some pharisees demand a sign from Jesus. They want him to prove that he is from God, to prove that he has the authority he says he has.

Jesus refuses their request. He is not a magician who conjures up miracles to impress people, or to compel them to believe in him. In fact, when you consider Jesus' miracles in the Gospel, you can see that they are not attempts to show-off or to grab attention and humiliate his critics, but rather responses to cries for help: the paralysed man, the bleeding woman, Jairus' daughter, blind Bartimaeus, etc. All of these came to beg Jesus with urgency and he in turn responded to them in mercy. Jesus' miracles represent a profound human encounter, encounters full of mystery and love, encounters which say something about what it means to be human and about human destiny. Nowhere do Jesus' miracles appear as "philosophical demonstrations". How can one subject an act of love to the scrutiny of a "logical exercise"?

Jesus makes it clear that miracles and faith go hand in hand (consider the story of the man whose son is possessed; Jesus says that only faith can help in those situations).

Miracles do prove God's love to those who believe in him, but it does not seem that they can have any value as a "proof" for a heart that is not disposed towards him.

In that sense, we can say that miracles do not prove God's existence philosophically--unless you subscribe to a type of philosophy that already accepts the existence of God, in which case they are useful in helping us to increase a little more our understanding of the Creator.