Why did A.J. Ayer argue that metaphysical statements about God were meaningless?

In his influential work Language, Truth, and Logic (1936), the British philosopher A.J. Ayer argued that metaphysical statements about God were meaningless because they failed to meet the criteria of his verifiability principle.12

Ayer, a leading proponent of logical positivism, maintained that for a statement to be cognitively meaningful, it must be either analytically true (such as a tautology) or empirically verifiable through sense experience. Because metaphysical claims—such as "God exists"—cannot be verified or falsified by any empirical observation, Ayer concluded they are not merely false or conjectural, but literally devoid of factual meaning.123

For Ayer, such statements do not describe reality; rather, they function as emotive expressions of feelings or attitudes. While he acknowledged that these expressions might serve a purpose in terms of human emotion or motivation, he insisted they should not be mistaken for genuine cognitive propositions that convey information about the world. This rigorous application of empiricism led him to categorize traditional metaphysical discourse as fundamentally nonsensical.13