Thomas Lepeltier just emailed me, letting me know that his new book is out: Vive le créationnisme!: Point de vue d’un évolutionniste. Based on my limited French, it looks interesting.
UPDATE: Someone kindly emailed me a translation of the page I linked to above:
Creationism gets people scared. We accuse it of all wrongs. It threatens both science and democratic society. Hence the regular calls to combat it in the name of rationality and secularism. Isn’t it time to once and for all get done with this anachronistic religious doctrine that’s being spread under scientific pretences?
Not quite, affirms Thomas Lepeltier. In this iconoclastic text, where he discusses the possible scientificity of creationism, he advances [an argument] that those who want the disappearance of creationism under the pretext that [creationism] wouldn’t be a scientific theory, but rather only a religious doctrine, promote, without realising it, a society where all dissent from all dominant scientific theories will have disappeared.
If that’s what the opponents of creationism want, the spirit of criticism which they pretend to be defending is under risk. Under the domain of reflection – like in politics, if we are democratic – shouldn’t it always be necessary to congratulate ourselves over the existence of contradictors, even when we consider them to be wrong? In short, in light of the simplistic turn of the contemporary debates on creationism, this is a work of urgent pertinence.
Bradley Monton's Blog 