Just found some helpful comments from people I imagine you would consider reputable scientists:

"Laws of nature are just models of the universe. they exist only in our minds and do not have any other reality."

That's Stephen Hawking.

It seems clear that we will never be able to explain our most fundamental scientific principles. (Maybe this is why some people say that science does not provide explanations,.... I think that in the end we will come to a set of simple universal laws of nature, laws that we cannot explain.

That's Steven Weinberg, Nobel Prize winning physicist

"It is important to realize that in physics today, we have no idea of what energy is."

Richard Feynman, physicist

"It is a fundamental mistake to identify a model with reality... Force, field...mass, energy,...space, time... particle, wave. [are simply elements in the scientific model]... We know now for sure that we do not know at all what matter is."

Chemist A. G. Cairns-Smith.

Virtually all of the over 1000 scientists I've talked with over nearly 50 years agree with the above,