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Life as science defines it is ONLY physical life, not the eternal life of the soul.

If your definition of life includes messages from Beyond and Mary the mother of God it is not a scientific theory.

By methodological naturalism and by the Newtonian paradigm (physical causation) - science relegates itself into an artificial, subordinate box of knowledge.

It can in no way project its findings from inside that box onto the outside "all that there is" which it declined to consider in the first place, e.g. to posit an answer to "What is life?"

Mathematics (in this case, Shannon's theory) has no artificial boundary. Likewise, here, that biology is not a "special case" of physics:

The Atomistic Structure of Relationship

The classic example betty boop and I have used so many times is a thought experiment. Break down a rock and a rabbit into its component parts. Eventually you will find they are made of the same quantum particles - but along the way, the rabbit died.

Or to put it another way, one can break a cell apart to examine its components like he would a machine, but he cannot put the parts back together again and have a functioning cell. Information (Shannon, successful communication) is not a physical part.

Concerning life, the whole is truly greater than the sum of its parts.