Modern times and the rise of science are the same thing. For convenience the year 1600 could be nominated as their joint birthday, although the preceding gestation had been long, and it was not until late in the century that the first true classic of science — Newton’s Principia — appeared.

But in the early decades of the century there were two outstanding figures who between them shed light that helped others see the scientific path ahead.

They were Francis Bacon and René Descartes. Neither made lasting scientific discoveries as such (though Descartes left a legacy to mathematics), but each examined the crucial matter of how inquiry should proceed. In their day thinkers did not differentiate between chemistry and alchemy, astrology and astronomy, medicine and magic.

Bacon and Descartes in their respective ways showed how to winnow the grain of knowledge from the chaff of nonsense. To them therefore is owed the first steps in true scientific method, which now, in its ideal application, involves the scrupulous testing of hypotheses by evidence, openness to public assessment of results, and readiness to revise or abandon theories in the light of new or better data.

As one would expect from the co-operative use of disciplined, sober and educated intelligence, the resulting achievements have been breathtaking, and have transformed the world for the good in all respects other than those in which politics and business have misapplied them.

Against the background of these thoughts it is instructive to consider three of this week’s news stories, printed as it happens on the same page in the same newspaper. One is a report from a scientific conference in Seattle, where the discovery was announced of a remote galaxy. It lies at a distance of 13 billion light years, which puts it almost at the edge of the universe.

Because distance is time in cosmological terms, to look at it is thus to see right back to a period only 750 million years after the Big Bang. The galaxy was detected by the Hubble space telescope, and its observations were confirmed by the Keck observatory on Hawaii.

The second story is the result of a poll conducted for ABC News in the United States, which showed that a majority of Americans believe that the earth was created in six days, that Moses parted the Red Sea, and that Noah and his family survived the flood in the ark, accompanied by the world’s animals in pairs.

E. M. Forster’s motto was “only connect”. After pondering the juxtaposition of these two stories for a while, one about fundamental science and the other about fundamentalist belief, one might turn, in the interests of making connections, to the third. This reports that despite the successes of the Western powers in Afghanistan, women there are still in thrall to the oppressions of a religious morality which condemns them to captivity, exploitation, indignity and death.

Girls are still married to adult men at ages as young as eight. A 16-year-old girl who fled her 85-year-old husband was arrested and sent to prison for doing so. In Herat any woman found with a male companion not related to her by blood or marriage is subjected to a virginity examination. In many places in Afghanistan women are still barred from education. Every 20 minutes of every day an Afghan woman dies in childbirth, and half of all women die in the course of one of their multiple (the average is eight) pregnancies.

These dismal data from a part of the world where religion is the only science remind one of an uncomfortable fact. Everywhere that religion has ever held temporal power, the result has approximated Taleban-style rule. We forget, in the West, how much it took to escape orthodoxy enforced by burnings at the stake, and how recently: indeed, at the beginnings of modern times with the rise of science.

It is said that we shall know a thing by its fruits. A striking fact about the adventure of science, whenever it escapes the attentions of those who pervert it to making war rather than progress, is how well it serves mankind.

Think of X-ray machines, social science research into human welfare, the appliances of leisure that fill our homes with colourful entertainments and music: it is hard not to make comparisons between a world ameliorated by these things and any world shaped by taking as true the bleak and desperate ignorances of ancient legends.