The "laws" of nature are human understanding of the underlying behaviours of the universe. Effectively they're theories that have been tested to destruction so frequently that it's pretty much absurd that the universe could work any other way. Right up to the moment when some Swiss patent clerk gets funny notions about space-time being bendy and shifts your paradigm out the door, down the hall, and into the crapper. But that's merely the limitations of our knowledge.
As we currently understand it the universe seems to behave in certain predictable ways. We may not understand them all and certainly don't understand them all very well, but the physical underpinnings of these "laws" appear to be real. This is possibly down to the fact that at its basis all reality is the interaction of some very fundamental particles, math, and logic. In a logical system, contradictions result in explosion of the system. In a physical system based on logic a physical contradiction might have similarly dire consequences. In a reality where momentum were not conserved it's easy to see how that might get into an ugly feedback loop with the outcome that everything either grinds to a stop or races off over the horizon. It may not be possible to have a stable, long-lived reality without some self-regulating framework at its base. This would bode poorly for the "supernatural".
On the other hand, if you want to invoke the multiverse and a little eternal chaotic inflation then it's easy to explain all these "laws" away with the weak anthropic principle. The bulk of the universe may well be a lawless wild west of wild and unpredictable behaviours, but only in the "small", well-regulated pockets where "laws" emerge by chance from the chaos will sentient life arise to observe it. The universe appears to be axiomatic because those are the conditions that favour life, sentience, and observation.
And on the gripping hand, our universe may well be evolved. Much like living creatures, universes that are well-regulated may well be better at spawning copies of themselves. Universes that lack internal self-regulation may be more likely to be prone to going "Boom", "Crunch", "Pffft", or any mix thereof before they can reproduce.
As we currently understand it the universe seems to behave in certain predictable ways. We may not understand them all and certainly don't understand them all very well, but the physical underpinnings of these "laws" appear to be real. This is possibly down to the fact that at its basis all reality is the interaction of some very fundamental particles, math, and logic. In a logical system, contradictions result in explosion of the system. In a physical system based on logic a physical contradiction might have similarly dire consequences. In a reality where momentum were not conserved it's easy to see how that might get into an ugly feedback loop with the outcome that everything either grinds to a stop or races off over the horizon. It may not be possible to have a stable, long-lived reality without some self-regulating framework at its base. This would bode poorly for the "supernatural".
On the other hand, if you want to invoke the multiverse and a little eternal chaotic inflation then it's easy to explain all these "laws" away with the weak anthropic principle. The bulk of the universe may well be a lawless wild west of wild and unpredictable behaviours, but only in the "small", well-regulated pockets where "laws" emerge by chance from the chaos will sentient life arise to observe it. The universe appears to be axiomatic because those are the conditions that favour life, sentience, and observation.
And on the gripping hand, our universe may well be evolved. Much like living creatures, universes that are well-regulated may well be better at spawning copies of themselves. Universes that lack internal self-regulation may be more likely to be prone to going "Boom", "Crunch", "Pffft", or any mix thereof before they can reproduce.
