@martinies,
If you were a bird, you would have no concept of "wall" or "China" or "cause" or "God".
For humans, "fear of death" might be cited as "a cause" for human constructions (whether they be walls or gods) but not "death" itself. The fact that constructions can result in deaths is no more significant than any other cause of death.
If you are simply playing with the concept of entropy....something along the lines that "order" is balanced by concomitant "disorder"... you still have the problem of defining "order" without reference to human cognition.
And if you are interested in definitions of "life" other than as an antithesis of "death" I recommend you read up on Maturana's
autopoiesis.