So I’ll phrase it a little differently: why shouldn’t we say that the reality described by these laws has always been as it is?

And again, the claim is not that they legislated themselves, but that reality was always this way. After all, in the end, something always existed. So why should that be God rather than a reality with laws of nature?

It makes no difference at all that it always existed. The Principle of Sufficient Reason still applies, according to which a reason is required for the very existence of something, not necessarily only for its coming into being. Keep reading.

And God Himself isn’t special? Doesn’t His very existence require a reason?

You read part of it, and from all the tension you want me to complete the rest for you here? Read it all.

Okay. I’ll come back after I read everything.

I read the relevant chapters. After that you go on there to discuss the definition of complexity, and that isn’t connected to my question.
What I understood there is the idea that these laws are ingenious, and therefore evolution (certainly when there is no randomness in it) only strengthens the physico-theological argument.
But my question is more fundamental. Why should we stop the regress at God rather than at the forces of nature themselves?
Why not assume that these forces simply always existed, and that’s that?

To the dear questioner,

According to science, in the very first moments after the beginning of the Big Bang, the laws of physics themselves changed as things went along.
So you can’t assume from the outset that they always were as they are.

You can say that perhaps there were always "some laws or other," which is already a somewhat sharper claim.

And still, Michi’s argument about a simple intuition is completely legitimate, even though it does not have 100% certainty, like anything else. In the end, everyone makes his own choices and decisions.
And like Michi, I too am convinced that the patterns of nature most likely do point to a creator.
All the more so when you see something as amazing as one small, simple cell in the human body, with this whole insane biochemical mechanism made possible by the patterns of nature.

You’re only pushing it one step back for me. So the reality that functions according to these laws is certainly not eternal. But it could still be that the laws before the Big Bang are eternal!
What is the reason to stop the regress at God rather than at those laws?

There is no relevance at all to the changing of the laws of nature. They did not change either. There are processes of change within the laws. But this whole discussion is irrelevant, because we are talking about the fundamental laws within which everything takes place.

I do not know exactly what you are reading, but in The First Existent I explained these things very clearly. I’ll address it briefly here. The laws of nature are not entities. They describe the conduct of the world. Therefore the question of who legislated them requires an answer. By contrast, the forces of nature, those that carry out these laws, are part of the world. Those forces themselves are part of creation. The claim is that behind creation there must be an entity that created everything and itself was not created and does not need a cause (according to Ockham’s razor, it is reasonable that it is one and not many—not so for the forces of nature). That entity indeed departs from the general rule that every complex thing requires a composer, because without that departure we end up in an infinite regress. And giving up causality altogether is not reasonable, because intuition says it is true. Therefore lex specialis says it is preferable to keep the rule and make only the minimum necessary exception to it. That is God.
If, in your view, the forces of nature are the primary being that needs no cause, then they are God. The physico-theological argument says nothing about who that being is, only that such a being exists.
And on top of all that, God is not necessarily complex either. On the contrary, in our tradition it is customary to think of Him as utterly simple.

But why prefer that the primary being be something intelligent and possessed of will, like God? Why not prefer it to be lifeless, inert forces of nature?

That is already a different question. The argument proves the existence of some sort of being. Whether it has will and intention is a different discussion. The claim is that if not, then it too would need a creator. Otherwise it is a machine that mechanically created the laws of the world, and it is not essentially different from the laws themselves. It too requires explanation. If it has will and intention, then it provides an explanation for the laws, because it wanted them and therefore created them.

So if I understood correctly, your argument is this:
1. The world testifies to intelligence.
2. Evolution shows that within the framework of the laws, the world was created, as it were, by itself.
3. Intelligent laws that produce an intelligent world testify to intelligence.
4. There is an intelligent creator with infinite will.
5. It has no creator, because otherwise there would be an infinite regress, and it makes the most sense to stop the regress at the intelligent one rather than at a dead force that happened to create such a world.

Correct