If nothing were more assured than its opposite, how could knowledge ever succeed?

Objects to

The skeptic holds that to every claim there stands an opposing claim of equal strength: none would deserve our assent more than another.
Yet some knowledge succeeds where its opposite would fail: the astronomer announces the eclipse to the minute, medicine pushes back diseases, the engineer launches a probe that reaches its target billions of kilometres away.
If all theses were of equal worth, these repeated successes would be a sheer miracle. The simplest thing is to admit that some beliefs are better grounded than their opposite, without being definitive for all that.

Therefore So the perfect balance of reasons is an illusion: experience decides, and some of our beliefs have earned the right to be preferred.

Deepenings

The no-miracles argument

The philosopher made it into a famous argument: the lasting success of science would be a miracle if its theories grasped nothing real.
The skeptic may reply that "it works" does not prove "it is true": an effective instrument can rest on a false theory, just as people long calculated correctly from imaginary heavens.

Possible resolutions of the objection

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Challenges