Bayes didn’t need the help. His paper is remembered and argued about 250 years later, not for its theology but because it shows that you can deduce the probability of a cause from an effect. If we know the cause, it is easy to estimate the probability of the effect, which is a forward probability. Going the other direction—a problem known in Bayes’s time as “inverse probability”—is harder. Bayes did not explain why it is harder; he took that as self-evident, proved that it is doable, and showed us how.
This is exactly what Einstein was doing with his thought experiments;inferring the existence of invisible things based on the observed effects and hypothetical mechanisms.
