Problems with evolution? Submit your questions.

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The absence of proof does not mean that proof does not exist somewhere. It just means we haven't found it yet OR it really doesn't exist. Like you said, time will tell.

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In the case of the Oort Cloud there are very good reasons to think that the cloud is there but hasn't been found yet.Firstly we have solid evidence that the Earth and the Solar System really are old.Secondly, all that is being proposed is that the Solar System stretches out further than the furthest observed object. There's no good reason to suppose that there is a sudden "stop" rather than more gradual "thinning out" of material that is proposed.Thirdly we have observed objects in the Kuiper Belt (which is more important for the short period comets that the Creationist argument deals with anyway).Fourthly comet nuclei at that distance are incredibly difficult to observe. There is no good reason to think that we would have seen them yet.Because of the evidence of age we can't simply discard the idea, we must look at reconciling the evidence. The Oort Cloud is a highly plausible hypothesis given the evidence that we do have. It is not nearly so plausible that all the evidence of age just happens to be wrong (check out RAZD's thread on correlations). So the rational conclusion is that the Oort Cloud does exist. Even if it turned out that it did not then we should still have to consider alternative explanations (maybe involving the Kuiper Belt) before concluding that the Earth was young. Only someone driven by the conviction that the Earth was young, and looking for excuses to reject the evidence, could think otherwise.

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So all I have heard is that Dembski and Gitt are wrong. Do any of you purpose any other way of differentiating between random key strokes and the written English language?

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Of course the problem domain we are concerned with is NOT written English language so even if Dembski's and Gitt's methods worked there, there is no reason to think that they would necessarily be good when applied to biology.In fact it is easy to come up with a method better than Dembski's - instead of leaving design as the default hypothesis, to be assumed whenever a result appears sufficiently interesting we could make design a positive hypothesis to be compared with other explanations. Doing so also avoids the problem that Dembski's method requires probability calculations which may not be practical in non-trivial cases.And Gitt's method is only applicable to genuine languages, so for any other field any workable method would be better !