Science Quote by Rupert Sheldrake

The barb here lands because it flips the self-image of scepticism on its head. Scepticism sells itself as mental toughness: the willingness to sit with the unknown, to withhold assent, to let evidence accumulate. Sheldrake is pointing at a counterfeit version - not doubt as disciplined restraint, but doubt as a comfort blanket. The kind that needs the world to be closed, tractable, already accounted for.

The key word is "can't bear". It paints scepticism not as a method but as a temperament: brittle, reactive, even anxious. In that reading, uncertainty isn’t a prompt for better questions; it’s a threat to status and control. So the sceptic performs certainty by negating: if something doesn’t fit the reigning model, the safest move is to label it nonsense, pseudo, impossible. The posture looks like rigor, but the motive is emotional.

Context matters because Sheldrake has long been positioned as a scientific heretic, criticized for advocating ideas many researchers see as speculative at best. In that ecosystem, "scepticism" can become institutional muscle memory, protecting hard-won standards against fraud and wishful thinking. Sheldrake’s sentence is a counterattack: he suggests that gatekeeping sometimes masquerades as rationality, and that the policing of anomalies can be less about evidence than about preserving a settled worldview.

It works rhetorically because it doesn’t defend his claims directly. It indicts the psychology of the opponent, implying that the real anti-scientific impulse isn’t curiosity gone wild, but certainty disguised as doubt.