It has rightly been said that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. I can offer no evidence that a man is standing at the South Pole at this moment, but that is not evidence that the South Pole is unoccupied.
Incidentally, this is why arguments from silence across every academic discipline tend to be very weak. For example, the fact that St Paul references Our Lady only once – and even then it is in passing – is not in itself evidence that St Paul considered Our Lady to be unimportant.
With that being said, there certainly are situations in which the absence of evidence can amount to evidence of absence. The Christian philosopher William Lane Craig points to two conditions which must be fulfilled in order for such a situation to occur:
