You can use scholarship (research, documentation, citation, etc) to establish a fact, but it cannot be used to prove or disprove an idea. To begin with, ideas, are by their very nature unprovable, otherwise they would have been either accepted or discarded a long time ago.

In fact, sometimes the reliance on detailed research to support an idea is often prima facie evidence of the intellectual poverty and shallowness of its proponents. Look for yourself at the extensively footnoted arguments of the creationists, religionists and anomalists, and of the political bloggers, or even of some of the posters here. Under scrutiny, many of them either are irrelevant or inapplicable to the discussion, or as we have seen, deliberately cooked.

To begin with, to accept them you first would have to verify the validity of all that documentation, to make sure it is not downright manufactured or taken out of context, or cherry-picked, or from biased or disreputable sources. We've already seen here how unscrupulous commentators can use the reluctance or inability of the reader to personally verify every citation, to cloak their questionable assumptions in the appearance of careful research.

I have no doubt these remarks will be attacked with the charge that this correspondent feels that research is useless and not to be trusted, and that I believe careful study should be replaced by emotional response and philosophical wool-gathering.

Don't let them get away with it, that is not what I'm saying at all. My point is that you can make an assertion of a fact more convincing by locating the testimony of witnesses or the analysis of experts in the field. But a philosophical position, an idea, the heart of some controversy, cannot be proven or disproven by going to the library. In fact, if you actually do that, you will find that ALL sides of EVERY issue ALWAYS are highly supported by extensive documentary evidence.