> not comfortable with the word "laws"

Pehaps you're a victim of the "etymological fallacy," which holds (of course) that the original, or some older meaning, of a word is either the "real" meaning, or else powerfully influences the way the word is ordinarily used today. This fallacy frequently afflicts well educated people who are sensitive to the use of words.

Scientists talk about natural "laws" all the time, fully realizing that nobody "passed" these laws, or "punishes" their "violation," if violation is possible. They realize the "laws of physics," for example, have nothing whatever to do with any legal system.

Newton, on the other hand, like most people in the distant past, assumed that God had decreed the workings of nature, making "laws" a perfectly understandable descriptive term.

Except in an explicitly theological context, or among overthinkers and tendentious debaters, the phrase "laws of nature" no longer implies what it did in the seventeenth century.