The assumption that laws of nature are permanent isn't a dogma. It has been confirmed by any experiment made. Obviously laws could be changing so slow that cannot be measured, but then the claim they are really changing is a metaphysical claim and we will continue assuming that they don't change.
There is no logical reason to invoke a Creator, even less when the Universe is defined as an isolated system.
I see no reason supporting the idea that the design of the universe couldn't be other. So questions as "why is the universe the way it is and not something completely different?" don't make any sense to me.
An algebra of kind 2x2 = 22 is relatively easy to imagine.
Masses aren't "initial conditions"; the state space is (p,q). Masses are parameters. Also in one sense initial conditions aren't accidental, because they are final conditions for previous trajectory.
I don't find anything surprising on Newtonian laws describing the motions of planets orbiting the Sun, but not the number of the resulting planets, and their respective orbits. Newtonian laws don't describe the number of particles neither their mass or energy.
I always find interesting to see some physicists considering the possibility of multiverses, which is a non-physical hypothesis. Discussions about multiverses would be better left to philosophers.
Information Physics is a buzzword. There is no central role of information in physics, and the work of people as Jaynes has simply added confusion and nonsense to physics. I recall here Balescu criticism of the thermononsense school: "Jaynes' and coworkers theory is based on a non-transitive evolution law that produces ambiguous results. Although some difficulties of the theory can be cured, the theory "lacks a solid foundation" and "has not led to any new concrete result"".
Knuth' work is another rehash of older and debunked ideas introduced in the early times of quantum theory about "observers playing a central role" in Nature, and taken to its extreme by Wheeler's nonsensical "it from bit".