The flaws in the laws

I'm out of my depth with some of what Paul Davies is saying in this article, but I won't let that stop me engaging with a part of his argument I think I do understand (see also here.). Davies identifies a problem with the multiverse theory, this being that...

... there has to be a physical mechanism to make all [the] universes and allocate bylaws to them. This process demands its own laws, or meta-laws. Where do they come from?

Davies then goes on to explain that, in this regard science has the same problem as religion:

The root cause of all the difficulty can be traced to the fact that both religion and science appeal to some agency outside the universe to explain its lawlike order. Dumping the problem in the lap of a pre-existing designer is no explanation at all, as it merely begs the question of who designed the designer. But appealing to a host of unseen universes and a set of unexplained meta-laws is scarcely any better.

This shared failing is no surprise, because the very notion of physical law has its origins in theology. The idea of absolute, universal, perfect, immutable laws comes straight out of monotheism, which was the dominant influence in Europe at the time science as we know it was being formulated by Isaac Newton and his contemporaries. Just as classical Christianity presents God as upholding the natural order from beyond the universe, so physicists envisage their laws as inhabiting an abstract transcendent realm of perfect mathematical relationships. Furthermore, Christians believe the world depends utterly on God for its existence, while the converse is not the case. Correspondingly, physicists declare that the universe is governed by eternal laws, but the laws remain impervious to events in the universe.

So if that's the problem, what's the solution? From here on in I start to lose track of some of this, the computer software stuff in particular; but in a word the solution is that physical laws are emergent with the universe itself. Davies writes:

I think this entire line of reasoning is now outdated and simplistic. We will never fully explain the world by appealing to something outside it that must simply be accepted on faith, be it an unexplained God or an unexplained set of mathematical laws. Can we do better? Yes, but only by relinquishing the traditional idea of physical laws as fixed, perfect relationships. I propose instead that the laws are more like computer software: programs being run on the great cosmic computer. They emerge with the universe at the big bang and are inherent in it, not stamped on it from without like a maker's mark.

And there's more, in elaboration of that point. OK, now I get, or think I get, that unlike God and meta-laws on the old conception of them, these emergent laws are not outside, they're inside, the universe; and there's a sort of interactivity between them and it, rather than a relationship of one-way governance. What I don't get is how the notion of a universe so related to its laws avoids the question held by Davies to embarrass both religion and pre-existing science: the question of where they (the laws), or where it (the designer), come or comes from? We now have a universe and we have laws that are inherent in it. But where does this come from? Or stepping up a level, why isn't the same question applicable to the universe itself that Davies says was troubling for laws of physics as previously conceived? And if the answer is that the universe just is, why couldn't the old laws of physics also just be?

I know, I know: 'Why is there something rather than nothing?' 'Even if there were nothing you'd still be complaining!'