Citing Kip Thorne:

Throughout this book, I shall adopt, without apology, the view that there does exist an ultimate set of physical laws (which we do not as yet know but which might be quantum gravity), and that those laws truly do govern the Universe around us, everywhere. They force the Universe to behave the way it does.

Then commenting on that Stenger says:

"This is essentially the conventional view. However, as philosopher of science Bede Rundle recently put it, "It is high time this convention was abandoned." In this book I abandon that convention. I will show that the laws of physics are simply restrictions on the ways physicists may draw the models they use to represent the behavior of matter. These models describe scientific observations of an objective reality that surely exists independent of human thoughts. However their spedific forms depend very much on those thoughts."

" I am not claiming that space, time ,matter, or any of the other elements of our models do not exist "in reality". However, I cannot prove that they do; furthermore, I have no need to provide such a proof. As long as our models successfully describe privious observations and predict future ones, the we can use them without ever getting into metaphysical questions."