What does 'beyond the physical' even mean?
Nobody knows, even science and religion will never answer that question, and yet most people feel a sense of Purpose and Will outside of themselves. Of course a sense of, feelings, faith are not answers and mean not much really, but how fortunate we are to have such an abstract capability that we can imagine all those mythologies you mentioned.
If there is an objective world it will never be understood by science or religion. It is beyond human capability to comprehend, which is a bit of a cop-out, but it stands to reason that the Cause must be completely external to and no part of nature. So all religious belief is a construct of the mind, heaven, hell, God, the human spirit, demonic possession, Satan, priests able to forgive sin, stigmata, bleeding statues, holy water, speaking in tongues, there's no end to it. Just watch old Benny Hinn and those other TV Evangelists knock people over with the Holy Spirit and you will get the picture of just how vulnerable humans are, how wonderful and at the same time utterly stupid we are. There is no end to human fallibility leading to fantasy and maybe as an animal transitions to human this is the sad path we have to take.
We often overlook the fact that we are a work in progress and have not arrived but where we are. There can be no consensus at this stage of the journey but stick around for another thousand years or so and you might see the beginnings of consensus. It's far too early yet and too much fun killing and abusing each other to find a consensus.
That said the alternative is to suggest that nothingness caused everything. Once nothingness caused itself it then caused a universe with improbable exactitudes, imposed natural laws and limitations, produced life from non-life and human intelligence to exceed all the limitations it imbued evolution with.
So basically we haven't got a clue and no side is holding the higher ground.
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