Well one of the questions was 'IF the universe is expanding, where is it expanding from' and the other was 'What happened before the big bang' (I paraphrase in both cases).

Both had a tone in their voice suggesting they had some uber-clever question with which to catch out probably the greatest living British mind, and both asked questions that could've been answered by myself or any of the about 50 people from the physics department who attended the lecture. It angered me, I must say.

You do realize that there are snide believers in evolution, also...right? Just being a creationist doesn't make someone "snide".

The GP was using an adjective to modify the noun in the sentence- 'creationist.' If every creationist were snide, he wouldn't have used the adjective because it would have been redundant. He chose to call the creationists in this scenario 'snide' because they were asking rudimentary questions to a man for whom communication is a great chore.

I don't know if it was intentional or not, but I'll point out that the GP did not apply other adjectives to the creationists that might have seemed redundant.

I'm glad to hear it.

These things are relative, of course: Professor Hawking's "good health" is a serious illness by most usual standards. He's not a young man, either.

Nevertheless, I wish him well.

...laura

The common answer by scientists is quite unconvincing, and what it really amounts to is "sorry, can't explain it, the equations don't go back any further". A year or two ago I saw a Hawking video (covered on Slashdot) where he actually addressed this question as part of the presentation, and he gave the answer as a joke along the lines that God created Hell for people who asked such questions.