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Er, if I may interject something...

I'm arguing by reduction ad absurdam here. I believe life is simply a category, and like most categories it has fuzzy edges. But most attempts to make precise demarcations of life either include things like chain letters, which don't really seem to belong in the same category as amoebas and koalas, or make unscientific vitalist assumptions, which Pannenberg apparently does with his 'energy field', or include what seem to be arbitrary requirements, for example that life must contain DNA or RNA.

I believe what we are struggling with here is whether artificial life (computer viruses, robots, chain letters) ought to be excluded in a definition of "life." The original challenge by Pearson came long before the information age.

OTOH, is it valid to exclude Artificial Intelligence but accept artificially created biological life forms? Or should the term always be qualified, i.e. natural life v artificial life?

I think, as I previously said, that human life and human consciousness color our perception of what life is. If you arbitrarily exclude viruses from the set of living things, you can make a more convincing argument that "artificial" phenomena are nonliving.

I personally find this area of discussion interesting only when the parties to the discussion mutually agree that the problem is unsolvable with the current state of knowledge. It is my opinion that artificial entities will become increasingly complex with time and further erode the perceptual boundary between living and nonliving. But that is just an opinion.