I''d be thrilled to see your links, if you have time to locate and post them.
I could've sworn I had two PDF articles discussing the nature of the laws of physics...I can't find them now. But I do recall reading an article by Victor Stenger a couple of years ago, and I find that he has now turned that article into a book to be published next year. Here's a link to his website for the book; you can download each of his chapters as a PDF file:
The Comprehensible Cosmos: Where Do the Laws of Physics Come From?
(The name of the linked HTML file has a ring to it.)
As for the "appearance of design," doesn't Dawkins realize that things might "appear" to be designed because they actually are designed? That humans are just awfully good at spotting "design" in nature? I don't mean that a designer is running around actively producing natural forms; my conjecture is that something like an "algorithm in the beginning," as my dear friend Alamo-Girl puts it, "loaded in" that which conduces to design in the beginning. It does not fully specify absolutely every detail of organic and inorganic forms, for there is a random aspect built into the structure of things. But what it does do is constrain evolution and make it subject to laws.
I think the answer to both of your questions is "of course he realizes that". As for the 'algorithm at the beginning', one can't rule it out, but one also can't rule out that there was no algorithm but rather what we see is the unfolding of a cascade of causation from a rather simple beginning.
With respect to your remarks about Greek philosophy, you're in the company of Plato if you're distinguishing between ever-existent, always unchanging Being and never-existent, always changing Becoming (he lays that out with particular emphasis in the early pages of Timaeus, which I believe you've read if memory serves).
In a strict mathematical sense, there is no distinction here. Even in less strict terms, an 'algorithm' is nothing more than the name for a high-order representation of information, and therefore all information is an algorithm (and everything is information, mathematically). In this sense, there is nothing special about 'algorithms', at the "beginning" or elsewhere; if something exists at all it must be an algorithm.
The idea that data, information, patterns, computers, and algorithms are fundamentally different concepts is an intuitive but perniciously incorrect bit of common sense. It is one of the reasons information theory is so difficult to grok -- its fundamental theorems violate what most people "know".
Who's to say the "algorithm at inception" isn't awesomely simple? If this were the case, where is the difference between your argument and mine? Do you prefer the random to the intelligent in principle?
Indeed, Timaeus is one of my favorites. But Plato never said that being and becoming constituted a "true-or-false" proposition. It is a case of "both," for both are needed to express the ultimate nature of a living cosmos.
Good night, snarks. Must get some sleep. Thank you so much for writing!