I think the concept of emergence is something religious people have a tough time understanding.

[Igel]

6. Emergent properties are really common..

However, not just any structure provides useful emergent properties.

You can get complex arithmetic results from multiple layers (with recursion) of surprisingly simple logic gates.

You get wildly complex phonologies emerging from non-conscious analysis and grouping of speech tokens.

If you tweak the possible gates, if you tweak the structures that they're in, you usually get trash.

The idea of phonology being an emergent property resulting from speech-token analysis is useful. Not only does it trash the idea of teaching "phonemic awareness," but it gives us possible clues as to how language is structured and how humans perform non-conscious linguistic analysis.

The result isn't to say that there is no complexity. It's danged hard to plan emergent properties because the structure, the complexity, is distributed over more than just the initial organization of elements. It's a very elegant system, one that makes for the possibility of a lot of diversity (which means that it's very evolution-compatible), one that can be very robust, but one that is both flexible but also very difficult to design ex nihilo.

I don't see this as a death blow to either side. And, yes, creationists sometimes do "get" the idea of emergent properties. It's just that many of them quote both old-time creationists as well as old-time evolutionists. It's rather like historical linguistics--what's "cutting edge" might be an idea resurrected from the 1880s.