If your definition of life includes messages from Beyond and Mary the mother of God it is not a scientific theory.
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:
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.
But the thing is we CAN put the mechanical parts back together and have life that is completely indistinguishable from life that wasn’t taken apart and put back together.
Life as a physical phenomenon has no mystical component.
The physical mechanisms of life are both necessary and SUFFICIENT for there to be life.