This morning's Times Science Section takes up the endless debate and concludes (provisionally, of course):

Maybe both alternatives Platos eternal stone tablet and Dr. Wheelers higgledy-piggledy process will somehow turn out to be true. The dichotomy between forever and emergent might turn out to be as false eventually as the dichotomy between waves and particles as a description of light. Who knows?The law of no law, of course, is still a law.

While the patronizing pragmatist ever snickers at poor Thales:

Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds, goes the saying attributed to Richard Feynman, the late Caltech Nobelist, and repeated by Dr. Weinberg.