Did he actually say that?
The guy is a philosophical dunce. Before we discovered that time and space itself had a beginning the theists had already realized that God transcended both. Atheism had asserted that the universe did not need a cause because it always existed (Aristotle and others agreed the universe always existed but realized it still needed a transcended cause even on that view). The theist view was confirmed. The Atheist view was falsified. Hawking is trying to assert that the universe did not need a cause because there was no time for it to have had one. But the fact there was no time for it to have had one does not absolve it from the need for a cause, it simply rules out that the cause could be one that happened before it in time. Thus the cause was from outside of time and space.