Good thing or bad thing: Creationists in Taxonomy

In compiling an informal field guide to the Papilionoidea (that's big pretty butterflies) in China, I consulted D'Abrerra's classic monograph on the butterflies of Asia (which by the way really should be broken into Temperate and Tropical Asia). I found the following:

"I cannot except Eliot's system of classification [for one subgroup] based as it is on unfounded assumptions about the age of the planet and the origin of species."

I was stunned. He couldn't really mean what he seems to, could he? After digging around a bit, I found he did. D'Abrerra is (was?) an honest to goodness creationist. But he was also a pretty good taxonomist, and while is classification is a little out of date (refusing as he does most DNA based evidence and theories like coevolution), he has the class to cite alternative theories, which is more than I can say for many main-stream taxonomists.

Its this a good thing, or a bad thing? One one hand, we have someone doing reasonably good science (and making a great book) despite a deep religious conviction that evolution is false. On the otherhand the best book on the subject is a huge advertisement for anti-evolutionary theories of science and there is no alternative reading (no one's written it and we're a little short on taxonomists these days - thank you Bush's NSF budget).