You might be overthinking this. If natural laws are written in mathematics, who wrote them in the first place? A law is a social category, so the very notion of natural laws is implicitly theistic or deistic. As Davies says, this notion is a hangover from the early modern period which was still beholden to Christendom and to religious metaphors.

A law is also different from a nomic relation. The former is linguistic whereas the latter is metaphysical (or physical, cosmological, biological, etc). My point was that laws as linguistic, human formulations obviously depend on the existence of life, whereas there could be nomic relations even in a lifeless universe. Nomic relations are on the noumenal side of the Kantian divide, whereas natural laws are how we understand those real relations.

Davies and the other scientists often ignore that distinction so they equate the laws with the nomic relations, thus unwittingly (and annoyingly) entailing theism or deism. If the linguistic aspect of the nomic relations is real and objective, not just subjective or dependent on scientific inquiry, there would have to be an original lawgiver.

Regarding pantheism, I'm doing a series now on this controversial subject, so I'll be looking at it from different angles. Check back for more, if you're interested.

Yeah, I'm not so impressed by Dawkins's scientism. He just assumes that the noumenon depends on the phenomenon (to put it in Kantian terms). That is, he appeals to the human power of imagination, and says the universe must abide by that power of conception. That's similar to what theists do when they say there must be a God who created the universe, since that's the intuitive conclusion.

A world that wouldn't operate by mathematical regularity would be a supernatural one or pure nothingness. If math would apply even to those scenarios, then math would be unfalsifiable and theological in its scope, which is my deflationary explanation of math's universal applicability.