Paul Davies has done some interesting scientific work, and written some engaging popular books. However I think his NYT op ed is way off target. It is a brave attempt to carve out some intellectual respectability for religious beliefs. 

Like many bad arguments, it is based on some kernels of truth, and that is worth examining. Small elements of faith do crop into science generally, and physics in particular. 

A priori, there is no reason to believe that the universe has simple laws of physics. The entire endeavor of physics is based on the belief—Paul would say faith—that:

(a) The universe is governed by a set of laws. (b) We humans can figure them out.

On an individual basis, each physicist also has a third form of faith:

(c) That through my own hunches, guesses and hard work,  I can figure out some aspect of physical law.

Every discovery or invention is an unproven hunch or guess. You have to have faith in your own abilities, and your work, to move forward. But that is not capital "F" Faith of religion—it is the pragmatic working assumption that it is worth believing in yourself.  Frankly, proposition (c) is far more important to a working scientist than (a) or (b). Any rational scientist with a bounded ego has to conclude that he or she is likely to be weak link in the chain. There may be a physical law, but are you going to be the one to understand it? Or, to be more mundane, will your funding grant be approved so you can even ask? 

I think Paul is correct when he says that physicists have faith that (a)—(c) are true. It didn't have to be this way. The great physicist and Nobel Prize winner Eugene Wigner wrote a brilliant essay on this many years ago entitled "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences". 

So I will concede that every physicist has (implicitly at least) faith that these propositions hold, else why waste your time doing physics? However, Paul conveniently overlooks the fact that time and time again, both propositions have indeed proven to be true! Furthermore, they are put to the test repeatedly by a process in which they can fail. A working physicist assumes that (a) and (b) hold because there is a 500 year history of propositions and tests. The net result is what we know about physics, which describes the world very well indeed. 

The entire methodology of physics is to repeatedly test those propositions—both in the general sense, and specifically in terms of many individual theories put forth by physicists.   If nobody could make sense of the laws of the universe, physicists would have given up. If mathematics had not proven to be an effective language for describing the world (in Wigner's sense) then people would have eventually lost faith and given up. As indeed they have given up on thousands of theories and hypotheses over the years which failed the acid test of experimental or observational verification. 
To argue that physics is on the same level as religion is to ignore the fact that religious faith broadly does not admit that it could be wrong! Consequently, it performs no experiments or observations. Religion is a broad topic of course, and there are myriad disparate theologies and philosophies so it is impossible to generalize too much. However, I am not aware of any religion that repeatedly tests its propositions—either in terms of small details, or the broad foundations—with experiments and observations. Surely this is not the case with any Christian theology that I am aware of. 

There is a small and instructive exception in the case of Catholic saints. Non-martyrs require  "proof" of one "miracle"  to reach beatification. A second miracle is required to move up from beatification to full canonization. I find it quite interesting that empirical observational evidence is part of a religious process. In principle at least, it is an evidence based system. Both beatifications and canonizations have been refused on this basis (at least outwardly). 
Yet the role of observational evidence in this case  is the proverbial exception that proves the rule. The rules of evidence for miracles are essentially non-existent.  Non-miraculous explanations are not allowed to compete. The last thing that the church would allow would be a rigorous double-blind test of saintly efficacy. Once you started down that path, some doubting Thomas might ask about all of the other religious propositions. Why should any of religion be believed without proof? 

The modern theological answer is that Faith—believing something with no good reason—is somehow essential as a bedrock formation of religion. It is a bold strategy to take this weakness and promote it as a strength. It is also a modern affectation—efficacy was the goal in most early religions. People prayed and sacrificed to their gods for all sort of very practical real world purposes because they thought it would work. Over time theologians have retreated from the practical to spiritual domains, staying one step ahead of the law, so to speak. 

At this stage the faith required by a physicist is not whether propositions (a) and (b) are true, but rather will they remain to be true in the future. They are demonstrably true for every part of physical law that we have figured out to date. In this case, "figured out" means "the theory matches experiment or observation very well". 

To be fair, the past successes do not mean that they continue in the future. Perhaps it is only the simple stuff (or to be more precise, the low energy limit or some such) where it seems like physical laws exist. Or perhaps they exist but we're too dumb to figure them out, or can't get enough funding for the experiments. John Horgan wrote a book called The End of Science a few years ago arguing that modern particle physics may be in this situation. I disagree with Horgan, but it certainly is possible. Indeed my disagreement is a statement of faith that by continuing to investigate we'll push forward. 
Cosmology and fundamental particle physics are the branches of physics where these questions tend to be asked. It is pretty damn hard for a solid state physicist to get philosophical about what is happening inside a semiconductor—even though the same principles could crop up. Paul is a cosmologist, and so was I when I did physics. Cosmology asks questions like what is the fundamental nature of space and time? Where did the universe come from? These questions carry with them an unfortunate baggage that distract people with navel gazing and worrying about philosophical issues. Time and time again, even Cosmology has proven that the scientific method works—we know vastly more about the early Universe now than in the past. The baggage is annoying (and sometimes fun to speculate about) but ultimately science has triumphed. 
Paul's overall approach is to try to get the camel's nose inside the tent by saying "science is not without faith". I say so what? It is ridiculous to the repeatedly tested faith of science represented by (a) through (c) at the same level of the blind faith as religion, which has yet to face even a single good experimental test. Instead it has a 2000 year history (in the case of Christianity) history of failing to predict experiments. Why does this even matter? Indeed that is my final rejoinder to Paul. Yes, there is a certain measured, bounded, and repeatedly tested faith in science. That stands in sharp contrast to the unbounded and untested faith in religion. The two are not the same—indeed the way each field treats that faith is the telling point.

I was dismayed at how many of my detractors completely misunderstood what I had written. Indeed, their responses bore the hallmarks of a superficial knee-jerk reaction to the sight of the words "science" and "faith" juxtaposed.

The most common trap my critics have fallen into is in conflating the explanation of natural phenomena using the laws of physics, with an explanation of the laws themselves. I am not suggesting that the applicationof science is a matter of faith. Doing science involves employing testable hypotheses, refining theories and conducting experiments — in stark contrast to the practice of religion. The scientific method is the most reliable path to truth we know, and there is no more committed or passionate a scientist than I. Yes, "science works" as John Horgan points out. It is tested again and again as a description of nature. We are all agreed on that point. But it isn't the point I was trying to make. My argument refers, not to the scientific method, but to the underlying lawfulness of the universe itself, which raises questions such as where the laws come from, why they have the form that they do, and whether there is anything peculiar about the actual laws of the universe (such as being "fine-tuned" for life), as opposed to other possible laws. The orthodox position (and the one I set out to challenge in my book) is that the universe is governed by a fixed set of laws in the form of infinitely precise mathematical relationships imprinted on the universe from its birth. In addition, it is assumed that the physical world is affected by the laws, but the laws are completely impervious to what happens in the universe — they are immutable. It is not hard to see where this picture comes from: it is inherited from monotheism, which asserts that a rational being designed the universe according to a set of perfect laws. And the asymmetry between immutable laws and contingent states mirrors the asymmetry between God and nature: the universe depends utterly on God for its existence whereas God's existence does not depend on the universe. Historians of science are well aware that Newton and his contemporaries believed that in doing science they were uncovering the divine plan for the universe in the form of its underlying mathematical order. I am depressed that reminding scientists of this well-known historical fact should elicit such a shock-horror response. As Scott Atran points out, the argument that science is based on faith is not new. Evidently Western society is so steeped in monotheism that the monotheistic world view, which was appropriated by science, is now regarded as "obvious" and "natural." As a result, many scientists are unaware of its theological origin.  Nor do they stop to think about the sweeping hidden assumptions they adopt when they subscribe to that scientific/theological world view, assumptions that are in fact are not shared by most other cultures.

Not all scientists envisage the laws of nature in the theological manner I have described, however. One person who evidently doesn't is P.Z. Myers, who declares his a lack of faith in science and simply takes science "as it comes." I have found that his is a familiar position among biologists, for whom contingency as opposed to law looms so large in explanation. Unfortunately, Myers goes on to attribute to me precisely the point of view I am seeking to refute: "That Davies seems to believe that order must rule everywhere and at every level is a stronger presupposition than is warranted by a scientific approach, and sounds remarkably theological." Well, yes, that's the whole point of my article! It is theological — but it is nevertheless the orthodox view among theoretical physicists, especially those working on the search for a unified theory. Such physicists believe there are perfect laws "out there", existing in some Platonic realm, even if the laws we find in our textbooks today are merely approximations to what Steven Weinberg calls "the final theory". And that is the position that, contrary to Myers' statement, I seek to challenge in my book. In doing so, I encountered fierce opposition from my physics colleagues. For example, when I suggested in my book that infinitely precise mathematical laws might be an unjustified idealization, i.e. that there might be an intrinsic uncertainty or flexibility in the laws, many of my physics colleagues were aghast at this heresy. Jerry Coyne, in his response to my article, asks, "What do we [orthodox scientists] believe to be true without evidence?" Well, how about belief in infinitely precise laws which incorporate real numbers and differentiability? Show me the evidence for that. Or, to take another well-known example, laws that transcend the physical universe and exist in some sense prior to it, because the said laws are intended to explain the origin of the universe. Many cosmologists believe in such laws, which must be accepted without explanation or testability, as the basis of a scientific theory of cosmogenesis.

My article pointed out that the widespread belief in immutable perfect transcendent prior laws underpinning the physical universe, while not necessarily wrong, is nevertheless held as an act of faith, similar in character to belief in an all-perfect divine lawgiver. Let me be clear about the sense in which I am using the word faith here. Obviously faith in the laws of physics isn't on a par with "faith" in the popular religious sense (such as belief in miracles, prophecy, the bible as historical fact, etc., all of which I personally regard as completely ridiculous). Rather, in using the word faith I refer to the metaphysical framework, shared by monotheism and science (but not by many other cultures), of a rational ground that underpins physical existence. It is the shared faith that we live in a universe that is coherent, a universe that manifests a specific mathematical scheme of things, a universe that is, at least in part, intelligible to sentient mortals. These tacit assumptions running through science, that stem from monotheism, can all be challenged. The universe doesn't have to be that way! But most scientists believe it is that way.

Because the monotheistic world view pervading science is so deeply entrenched, asking where the laws of physics come from or why they have the form they do is frowned upon. Many respondents to my article ticked me off for venturing into such murky waters, or for expecting there to even exist an answer. I am grateful to Sean Carroll for so cogently expressing the orthodox view among physicists that the laws of physics must simply be accepted as a brute fact — that is, they exist without explanation, for no reason. "That's just how things are," writes Carroll. "There is a chain of explanations concerning things that happen in the universe, which ultimately reaches to the fundamental laws of nature and stops." For Carroll, as for many scientists, unexplained laws are thus are the starting point of scientific reasoning, the levitating superturtle at the bottom that holds up the whole tower, just as God is the levitating superturtle that holds up physical existence in monotheism. After 30 years of listening to sterile bickering in the science/religion debate I am utterly bored with the refrain from each side that, in effect, "my superturtle is better than your superturtle." So I have tried to elevate the level of discussion and move on.

To achieve progress, I set out to see how far we can go in describing the deepest properties of the physical universe without appealing to anything outside it — such as an unexplained transcendent god, an unexplained set of magically-imposed Platonic mathematical laws, or infinitely many unseen alternative universes. I concede that, so long as we are stuck with human modes of thought, we will ultimately have to accept something on faith, but I see no reason to stop with the laws of physics. So I question the idealized concept of immutable perfect laws that must simply be accepted as a brute fact — "on faith" (since we can test the laws only to finite precision). The time has come to seek a theory of the laws, to bring the laws of physics within the scope of scientific inquiry, and if possible to explain their intelligibility, their "unreasonable" mathematical efficacy and their celebrated (and baffling) bio-friendliness. A possible way to formulate a theory of laws was mooted thirty years ago by John Wheeler, who abandoned the traditional theological notion of immutable laws "cast in tablets of stone from everlasting to everlasting."  In my book I have sought to extend Wheeler's ideas in the light of recent work in the foundations of quantum mechanics, the theory of computation and holographic cosmology. Another possible approach to a theory of laws has been developed by Lee Smolin, and is mentioned briefly in his response to my article.

My interest in pursuing this project is to critically examine ultimate explanations of existence, for which there is a long tradition within religion, and a rather short one within science. I plead guilty to Lawrence Krauss' complaint that I am sidestepping some hugely important issues, such as the moral dimension of religious faith, the tragedy of human existence and suffering, and the question of purpose in the universe. My concern is admittedly with a restricted physics/cosmology agenda, as that is the only area in which I can claim some modest authority. However, the conceptual framework I am developing can accommodate a universe with something like "purpose," albeit one that is inherent in, and emergent with, the universe, rather than imposed upon it from without.

Paul Davies is a nice guy and graceful writer, but this essay reads like a parody of The Mind of God and other writings in which he glimpses fuzzy convergences between science and religion. Davies has sold lots of books peddling this theme, and he has won the $1,000,000-plus Templeton Award, created by the financier John Templeton to help bridge the divide between science and religion. I mention the Templeton moola because, as I've said previously, I believe it is distorting all this science-religion "dialogue."

In his New York Times OpEd, Davies notes that 'both monotheistic religion and orthodox science fail to provide a complete account of physical existence." While scientists have done a good job discovering basic laws of nature, they can't explain where the laws came from in the first place. They have tentative ideas—for example, involving other universes with vague connections to ours—but nothing supported by evidence, Davies says.

I've knocked multiverse theories too, and in fact I suspect we'll never know why our universe is the way it is. Many scientists, however, are optimistic that they will answer this question eventually. Noting that fact, Davies asserts that science and religion both "are founded on faith—namely, on belief in the existence of something outside the universe, like an unexplained God or an unexplained set of physical laws, maybe even a huge ensemble of unseen universes, too." Unless science can serve up a testable theory of where the universe and its laws came from, Davies concludes, science's "claim to be free of faith is manifestly bogus."

Huh? Science works. Scientists have gleaned deep insights into nature through experiment, reason and hard work. These tangible, world-transforming achievements inspire scientists' optimism—or "faith," to use Davies's term—that they will go even further. Religion has not told us one demonstrably true thing about nature. Not one! Religion is nothing BUT faith.

The only thing that's bogus here is Davies's analogy between science and religion.

I'm not sure why the New York Times saw fit to publish Paul Davies's curious op-ed, except that Davies does have a reputation as a popularizer of physics, and as something of an apologist for deism; they certainly couldn't have chosen to print it on its merits. His argument is the tired and familiar claim that science has to be taken on faith, so it's just like religion. I recall hearing variants on this back in the schoolyard, usually punctuated with "nyaa nyaas" and assertions about each others' mothers, and while we may not have said much about science, the principle was the same. Citing a false equivalency is a cheap argument, but not very credible.

Davies lost my respect for his thesis early on, from the first sentence actually, but I'll focus instead on this claim from his second paragraph:

All science proceeds on the assumption that nature is ordered in a rational and intelligible way. You couldn't be a scientist if you thought the universe was a meaningless jumble of odds and ends haphazardly juxtaposed.

Perhaps this is where not being a physicist has the virtue of a different perspective, because I can say without reservation that he's completely wrong—in a historical science like evolutionary biology, we have no problem when we encounter a phenomenon that isn't orderly or rational, and that has all the appearance of haphazard meaninglessness. We're accustomed to seeing simple chance as a strong thread running throughout biological history.

Pattern and order are important too, of course, but when looking at the appearance of some particular feature we have to be prepared for the possibility that it is not a consequence of some orderly progression—perhaps it just happened that way. I can't imagine that my physicist colleagues are any different, and that they would be horrified to discover that physical order was "rooted in reasonless absurdity". That would be interesting. If that is the way the universe is, that is what science will try to grapple with (admittedly, we might have serious difficulties grappling with total chaos, but no one claims that science can have answers for everything). That Davies seems to believe that order must rule everywhere and at every level is a stronger presupposition than is warranted by a scientific approach, and sounds remarkably theological…and I don't think Davies would object to the charge of theology, although he clearly thinks the only good science fits his theological model.

But then Davies does have this notion that that the concept of physical laws is derived from Christian doctrine—that science is rooted in attempts to define the actions of a supernatural lawgiver who imposes a kind of universal consistency on everything. As a historical argument, and as a psychological description of the way the minds of people like Newton worked, I can go along with that; but as an assumption that this expectation of a universal order must reflect a universal reality, I disagree. If the laws of physics were subtly different in Egypt than in Greece, we would have developed an empirical physics that took that into account; that certain laws are constant everywhere is just what is, as empirically determined by scientific observation. A geologist, a biologist, an anthropologist, and a historian will also be able to tell you that there are many things that are quite different between Egypt and Greece, and yet variation does not mean those sciences fail.

Alas, Davies also brings up the anthropic principle, that tiresome exercise in metaphysical masturbation that always flounders somewhere in the repellent ditch between narcissism and solipsism. When someone says that life would not exist if the laws of physics were just a little bit different, I have to wonder…how do they know? Just as there are many different combinations of amino acids that can make any particular enzyme, why can't there be many different combinations of physical laws that can yield life? Do the experiment of testing different universes, then come talk to me. Until then, claiming that the anthropic principle, an undefined mish-mash of untested assumptions, supports your personal interpretation of how the universe exists and came to be is a self-delusional error.

I'm also always a bit disappointed with the statements of anthropic principle proponents for another reason. If these are the best and only laws that can give rise to intelligent life in the universe, why do they do such a lousy job of it? Life is found in one thin and delicate film on one planet in this mostly empty region of space, and even if there are other fertile planets out there, they will be nearly impossibly distant, and life will be just as fragile and prone to extinction there as here. Even on this world, all of the available environments favor bacteria over scientists or theologians, and said scientists and theologians have existed for only about 0.00001% of the lifetime of this universe, and are prone to wink out of existence long before we can get rid of one of the zeroes in that number.

If I wanted to argue for a position on the basis of the anthropic principle, rather than trying to pretend that we live in a Goldilocks universe, we should be wondering how we ended up in such a hostile dump of a universe, one that favors endless expanses of frigid nothingness with scattered hydrogen molecules over one that has trillions of square light years of temperate lakefront property with good fishing, soft breezes, and free wireless networking.

Maybe Davies has faith in science, but I don't. I take it as it comes. I have expectations and hypotheses, but these are lesser presuppositions than what is implied by faith—and I'm also open to the possibility that any predictions I might make will fail. Perhaps if Davies weren't so obsessed with equating his religion with his science, he wouldn't be blind to the fact that most scientists don't see his god in the operation of the universe.

Why do the laws of physics take the form they do?  It sounds like a reasonable question, if you don't think about it very hard. After all, we ask similar-sounding questions all the time. Why is the sky blue? Why won't my car start? Why won't Cindy answer my emails?

And these questions have sensible answers—the sky is blue because short wavelengths are Rayleigh-scattered by the atmosphere, your car won't start because the battery is dead, and Cindy won't answer your emails because she told you a dozen times already that it's over but you just won't listen. So, at first glance, it seems plausible that there could be a similar answer to the question of why the laws of physics take the form they do.

But there isn't. At least, there isn't any as far as we know, and there's certainly no reason why there must be. The more mundane "why" questions make sense because they refer to objects and processes that are embedded in larger systems of cause and effect. The atmosphere is made of atoms, light is made of photons, and they obey the rules of atomic physics. The battery of the car provides electricity, which the engine needs to start. You and Cindy relate to each other within a structure of social interactions. In every case, our questions are being asked in the context of an explanatory framework in which it's perfectly clear what form a sensible answer might take.

The universe (in the sense of "the entire natural world," not only the physical region observable to us) isn't like that. It's not embedded in a bigger structure; it's all there is. We are lulled into asking "why" questions about the universe by sloppily extending the way we think about local phenomena to the whole shebang. What kind of answers could we possibly be expecting?

I can think of a few possibilities. One is logical necessity: the laws of physics take the form they do because no other form is possible. But that can't be right; it's easy to think of other possible forms. The universe could be a gas of hard spheres interacting under the rules of Newtonian mechanics, or it could be a cellular automaton, or it could be a single point. Another possibility is external influence: the universe is not all there is, but instead is the product of some higher (supernatural?) power. That is a conceivable answer, but not a very good one, as there is neither evidence for such a power nor any need to invoke it.

The final possibility, which seems to be the right one, is:  that's just how things are. There is a chain of explanations concerning things that happen in the universe, which ultimately reaches to the fundamental laws of nature and stops. This is a simple hypothesis that fits all the data; until it stops being consistent with what we know about the universe, the burden of proof is on any alternative idea for why the laws take the form they do.

But there is a deep-seated human urge to think otherwise. We want to believe that the universe has a purpose, just as we want to believe that our next lottery ticket will hit. Ever since ancient philosophers contemplated the cosmos, humans have sought teleological explanations for the apparently random activities all around them. There is a strong temptation to approach the universe with a demand that it make sense of itself and of our lives, rather than simply accepting it for what it is.

Part of the job of being a good scientist is to overcome that temptation. "The idea that the laws exist reasonlessly is deeply anti-rational" is a deeply anti-rational statement. The laws exist however they exist, and it's our job to figure that out, not to insist ahead of time that nature's innermost workings conform to our predilections, or provide us with succor in the face of an unfeeling cosmos.

Paul Davies argues that "the laws should have an explanation from within the universe," but admits that "the specifics of that explanation are a matter for future research." This is reminiscent of Wolfgang Pauli's postcard to George Gamow, featuring an empty rectangle: "This is to show I can paint like Titian. Only technical details are missing." The reason why it's hard to find an explanation for the laws of physics within the universe is that the concept makes no sense. If we were to understand the ultimate laws of nature, that particular ambitious intellectual project would be finished, and we could move on to other things. It might be amusing to contemplate how things would be different with another set of laws, but at the end of the day the laws are what they are.

Human beings have a natural tendency to look for meaning and purpose out there in the universe, but we shouldn't elevate that tendency to a cosmic principle. Meaning and purpose are created by us, not lurking somewhere within the ultimate architecture of reality. And that's okay. I'm happy to take the universe just as we find it; it's the only one we have.