Can humans understand realities beyond the physical world?

Yes — by reason, which knows the Creator exists, and by revelation, which tells us what we could not discover: the angels, the soul, the afterlife. We can know that God is; we cannot picture what He is (Qur'an 42:11).

Most atheist thinkers answer that there is no good evidence of anything beyond the physical to be understood: claims about spirits and hidden realms have never passed a fair test. Some add that if such realities existed and mattered, evidence of them should be easy to find — and it is not.

This is the question agnosticism exists to answer, and its two wings answer differently. Strong agnostics, following Kant and Spencer, hold that human faculties are built for the physical world and cannot reach beyond it; weak agnostics say only that no one has yet shown such knowledge — the door stays open.

Yes, but partly and by God's help: creation itself displays his power (Romans 1:20), and revelation displays his character — yet Paul concedes that 'now we see in a mirror, dimly' (1 Corinthians 13:12). Full knowledge belongs to the world to come.

Yes, within limits: God reveals what humans need to live rightly, but 'the secret things belong to the LORD our God.' Maimonides taught that we can know that God is, and what God is not, far better than what God is.

Yes — Buddhist texts teach that a trained mind can know realities beyond the physical, such as past lives and the workings of karma, as the Buddha reported from the night of his awakening. Yet some questions he set aside as unhelpful to answer, like whether the world is eternal.

Yes — that is the tradition's central project. The Katha Upanishad warns that the self cannot be reached by speech, mind, or eye unaided; it is known through shruti, a teacher, and disciplined contemplative practice, and those who complete the path are said to know it directly.

Yes. God is beyond form and beyond the mind's full grasp, yet can be truly known — though never fully comprehended — through remembrance of the Name, the Guru's word, and grace.

It takes no position — and treats that restraint as the point: whether humans can know realities beyond the physical is exactly the kind of question a neutral state must never answer on its citizens' behalf.

Most humanists say there is no reliable way to such knowledge: claims about realities beyond nature cannot be checked, so they are set aside. What people call spiritual — awe, love, wonder — is embraced as fully natural.

It does not say. Liberalism deliberately takes no position on realities beyond the physical; what it insists on, since Locke's Letter Concerning Toleration, is that no state may force such answers, because belief compelled is not belief at all.

Feminism takes no position: it is a claim about justice, not about what lies beyond the physical. Religious feminists answer yes from their faiths; secular feminists answer no or stay silent.

It makes no claim either way; questions beyond the physical world are left to its members' faiths. Scholars note, however, that nationalism often borrows the forms of religion — sacred flags, martyrs, shrines of unknown soldiers — without stating any metaphysics.