“We must beware, however, of suggesting that the infant who is not morally aware (less still the embryo in the womb), the paralysed person, the cancer patient, or the old person in whom rationality is fading, are, because of their incapacity, any less in a relationship with God just because they cannot do certain things. For the image is a task as well as a gift, a history as well as a status. It is a task and a history which moves through many phases from foetal life through infancy to mature adulthood and old age, from health to sickness, from incapacity through capacity to infirmity. What matters is not the presence of certain abilities, so much as the fact that God has set us in a certain relationship to himself.”1
26 Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”