Have you had experiences you'd describe as sacred, mystical and/or religious?

[Diablo]

That's a bit weird. How do we jump from the universe to god?...And really, your comment about 'someone who is sufficiently educated' is unnecessary.

The tone of my writing comes across as arrogant which is why some people call me a pompous ass. I used the phrase 'sufficiently educated' to mean those who know and correctly understand the philosophical tradition from the pre-Socratics to the Schoolmen. Many people are highly educated, even in Western philosophy, and yet have only a cursory understanding of the early history.

The question you raise is whether the sum total of reality is confined to the physical universe. I certainly do not think that the case since that would exclude things that everyone tacitly accept as part of reality, like the universal application of mathematics, semiotic meaning, and validity propositional logic. The nature of the physical universe and our experience of it is logically contingent on these prior features.

While these mental properties manifest together with physical processes, there is no justification for claiming that they must be reducible to physical processes. In fact there are good reasons for supposing that they are not, starting with basic common sense, because everyone lives their lives as if they have free will, make moral choices, words have meaning, and that rationality conforms to reality.

Well, I don't know you so I'm not going to call you arrogant, but you do sound pompous.

Philosophy leaves me cold. It was the only system that people had to explore the world before mathematics, and then science, came along, after which it became redundant. Anyone who wants to know anything now studies science, not the musings of some ancient Greek.

And you still haven't got to the god bit, by the way. Maybe you would get your message across better if you tried to use more precise language.