Even if theism is a failure, it's still superior to atheism

[Angrboda]

But there are times when absence of evidence *is* evidence of absence. For example, if I fail to detect an adult african elephant in my room, I can conclude that there is no adult african elephant in my room. 

Nope, you can't, if you fail to detect elephants in your room, this just means you failed to detect them, nothing more. I mean, most accidents in life happen because people are hilariously bad at detecting things.......?

Evidence is anything that supports a conclusion. An inference drawn from evidence can be wrong, that doesn't change its status as evidence. That's just the nature of inductive arguments. It's not proof that there are no elephants, but then he didn't say that it was.