Sea Breeze the words you quoted of Hawking forms part of a core basis of what Hawking said which convinced me no deistic being exists. Hawking says that gravity (by which he means the potential energy of gravity) is a type of negative energy. He says that because of its existence the grand sum total of the universe's mass-energy equals ZERO. That is because the sum of all of the negative energies cancels out all of the positive energies of the universe. Because of that (according to Hawking, Stenger, Lawrence M. Krauss, and other atheistic scientists) the universe could have come into existence from nothing (at least that which is commonly thought of as nothing) - without a being having created it. Lawrence M. Krauss is the physicist author of the book called A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing. One review of that book is the following.
“Nothing is not nothing. Nothing is something. That's how a cosmos can be spawned from the void -- a profound idea conveyed in A Universe From Nothing that unsettles some yet enlightens others. Meanwhile, it's just another day on the job for physicist Lawrence Krauss.”
-- Neil deGrasse Tyson, Astrophysicist, American Museum of Natural History
Victor Stenger agrees with this and further points that out many of that which are called 'laws' of physics are conservation 'laws' (such as one which one which is stated as 'that matter-energy cannot be created or destroyed, only transformed') and as such they could have arisen spontaneously. Victor Stenger gives a different explanation of the coming into existence (in the distant past) of other so-called 'laws' of physics.
Those scientists (and others) say that though there are that which are called 'laws' of science that does not mean they were made by a law maker (such as a creator god/God). The term "laws of science" simply means that the universe in a number of aspects acts in a consistent manner.
A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing: Krauss, Lawrence M.: 9781451624465: Amazon.com: Books states the following from the Preface of the above-mentioned book by Krauss.
'Before going further, I want to devote a few words to the notion of “nothing”—a topic that I will return to at some length later. For I have learned that, when discussing this question in public forums, nothing upsets the philosophers and theologians who disagree with me more than the notion that I, as a scientist, do not truly understand “nothing.” (I am tempted to retort here that theologians are experts at nothing.)
“Nothing,” they insist, is not any of the things I discuss. Nothing is “nonbeing,” in some vague and ill-defined sense. This reminds me of my own efforts to define “intelligent design” when I first began debating with creationists, of which, it became clear, there is no clear definition, except to say what it isn’t. “Intelligent design” is simply a unifying umbrella for opposing evolution. Similarly, some philosophers and many theologians define and redefine “nothing” as not being any of the versions of nothing that scientists currently describe.
But therein, in my opinion, lies the intellectual bankruptcy of much of theology and some of modern philosophy. For surely “nothing” is every bit as physical as “something,” especially if it is to be defined as the “absence of something.” It then behooves us to understand precisely the physical nature of both these quantities. And without science, any definition is just words.
A century ago, had one described “nothing” as referring to purely empty space, possessing no real material entity, this might have received little argument. But the results of the past century have taught us that empty space is in fact far from the inviolate nothingness that we presupposed before we learned more about how nature works. Now, I am told by religious critics that I cannot refer to empty space as “nothing,” but rather as a “quantum vacuum,” to distinguish it from the philosopher’s or theologian’s idealized “nothing.”
So be it. But what if we are then willing to describe “nothing” as the absence of space and time itself? Is this sufficient? Again, I suspect it would have been . . . at one time. But, as I shall describe, we have learned that space and time can themselves spontaneously appear, so now we are told that even this “nothing” is not really the nothing that matters. And we’re told that the escape from the “real” nothing requires divinity, with “nothing” thus defined by fiat to be “that from which only God can create something.”
It has also been suggested by various individuals with whom I have debated the issue that, if there is the “potential” to create something, then that is not a state of true nothingness. And surely having laws of nature that give such potential takes us away from the true realm of nonbeing. But then, if I argue that perhaps the laws themselves also arose spontaneously, as I shall describe might be the case, then that too is not good enough, because whatever system in which the laws may have arisen is not true nothingness.
Turtles all the way down? I don’t believe so. ... Surely, invoking “God” to avoid difficult questions of “how” is merely intellectually lazy. After all, if there were no potential for creation, then God couldn’t have created anything. It would be semantic hocus-pocus to assert that the potentially infinite regression is avoided because God exists outside nature and, therefore, the “potential” for existence itself is not a part of the nothingness from which existence arose.'