Where does the something that everything must come from, come from?

In his new book "The Grand Design," Stephen Hawking writes:

Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. (...) It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.

Naturally, the statement caused quite an uproar and a lot of polemics from apologetics. It may just be my bad luck, but quite honestly I have not read one single response to Hawking's claims that would be in any way insightful, or even intelligent for that matter. Every single defender of religion that I've read argued against Hawking using some version of the famous First Cause Argument: Whatever begins to exist has a cause, therefore the Universe has a cause, the "First Cause" of everything there is. Apologetics identify the First Cause with God.

Newsflash: The First Cause argument is logically flawed. As in: it's wrong. It commits the fallacy of "begging the question" or, in much less fancy terms, simply assuming what it's trying to prove. Suppose everything that exists must indeed have a cause. Then it does follow that the Universe must have a cause. But what caused the First Cause? You just assumed that everything must have a cause, so the First Cause must have one too. What is it? The Mother of All Causes? And who's her mother? In other words, if everything that exists must have a creator, then who created the creator? Note that you're not allowed to say that God exists without having to be created because "that's His nature." That's not an argument; it's a hand-wave. We might just as well assume that the Universe created itself out of nothing because "that's its nature."

But some response pieces are even more confused that just relying on the First Cause Argument, and I'll write about one of those. It's an essay by Pawel Lisicki, editor-in-chief of one of the largest daily papers in Poland, "Rzeczpospolita." Referring directly to Hawking's above quote, Lisicki writes

Both creation and spontaneity (...) are concepts that are well-defined only in the realm of personal metaphysics and religion. Only a person, an agent (...) who has free will and ability to reason, can be spontaneous.

Strike one for monumental ignorance. Spontaneous appearance of things uncaused by an intelligent agent is directly observable. Certain particles have been observed to appear spontaneously, out of absolutely nothing. The price mechanism causes millions of unconnected individual decisions to coordinate into one huge resource-allocating machine which does not have a conscious designer. Further, Lisicki writes

In Christian thought, being able to create something is an attribute of God (...) only through analogy and metaphor can we also talk of human creation. Impersonal, spontaneous creation as a cause that the world exists is a self-contradictory concept.

Strike two for ignorance coupled with pretentiousness. Lisicki says that impersonal spontaneous creation is a self-contradictory concept, and that's because... it's inconsistent with the definition of creation that he is using! In other words, he clearly has no idea what "self-contradictory" even means; he's just pretentiously throwing the term around because it makes him sound all smart and everything. To top things off, the definition he's using makes his reasoning perfectly circular. Effectively, Lisicki's entire argument is this:

I've just assumed that everything that exists has been created. I've also defined "creation" as something only God can do. Therefore, the Universe has been created by God.

That's all of it, really. How completely uncritical of your own beliefs do you have to be to think this is actually a sound argument?