Do the "laws of physics" have some independent ontological status? Are they
some sort of effective edict that material "stuff" must "obey"?
I have long found this legal metaphor quite problematic. I prefer to see
the "laws" as the patterned consequences of the "being" that the
constituents of the universe possess. Laws are patterns of relationship and
action, often about what we call 'cause' and 'effect', and often
expressible in mathematical form.
Physical/material systems behave in patterned ways as a consequence of
their fundamental "being," of what they are. It is the nature of electrons
and protons, for instance, to interact in accordance with patterns that we
cast in the language of electromagnetics and quantum mechanics, etc.
Thus my version of Bert's question would be, What is the source of the
"being" of the universe? Physics, I submit, has no answer. Physics is a
powerful discipline for coming to know about the particular character of
the physical/material components of the universe that has being, but has no
access to knowledge about the ultimate source of that being. In that sense
it is primarily descriptive; it gives us a way to understand particular
behavior patterns in terms of the particular character of the being that
the universe has. Its "explanations" are limited to proximate (within the
universe that is) cause/effect relationships. It has no *ultimate*
explanation for why the universe has any being at all or why the universe
has the particular being that it manifests.
The great divide between naturalistic and theistic worldviews lies in the
vastly differing answers given to the question regarding the source
(Source) of the universe's being--Nothingness, or a Creator-God.
What I call the "Fully-Gifted Creation Perspective" offers Christians a way
to celebrate the robust character of the Creation's being (robust enough to
make something as astounding as evolutionary development possible) and to
get off the fruitless path of looking for vacancies in the Creation's
being, looking for gaps in its menu of formational capabilities, gaps that
would make evolutionary continuity impossible, gaps that could be bridged
only by occasional irruptive episodes of form-imposing intervention.
Howard Van Till