Stephen Hawking Says God is "Not Necessary" for Creation

Today, Fox News published a story about physicist Stephen Hawking crediting the laws of physics for the creation of the universe rather than God. He is quoted as saying:

"Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing"

From reading this, you might say to yourself that if God created the laws and the laws "created" the universe, then God still created the universe. If that is the case, then the existence of the universe is still dependent on the existence of God. However, to fully complete his denial of God, Dr. Hawking then goes on to exclude even this notion:

"It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going."

Really?
Is one of the greatest scientific minds of all time not capable of understanding the fact that the existence of anything at all is evidence for the existence of God? The way that God exists is different from the way that we understand existence, nor are we capable yet of understanding how He exists because He has not yet revealed it to us. The mere fact that we as human beings are capable of understanding the concept of existence indicates that there must be something which supersedes existence as we know it, and the thing which supersedes our concept of existence is God. Whether you believe that the bible is His inspired Word or not is an entirely different matter, but this truth is so self-evident and simple that no one has any excuse not to believe it:

Romans 1:20

For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.

When it says "men are without excuse," it means that anyone who denies that there is a higher power that created what we see is lying to themselves. The article points out that Stephen Hawking once retained a view which acknowledged God. In A Brief History of Time, he wrote the following:

"If we discover a complete theory, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason -- for then we should know the mind of God,"

I wonder what made him decide to lie to himself.