Why did A.J. Ayer criticize the religious and socially conservative philosophy establishment at Oxford?

A.J. Ayer’s criticism of the religious and socially conservative figures who dominated the University of Oxford was rooted in his "instinctively irreverential" nature and his commitment to radical empiricism and logical positivism.12

Influenced by the works of David Hume and Ludwig Wittgenstein, as well as the motto of Bertrand Russell—that it is undesirable to believe a proposition without grounds for supposing it true—Ayer sought to challenge traditional metaphysical and religious discourse. Through his seminal work, Language, Truth, and Logic, he utilized the verifiability principle to argue that metaphysical claims about God or transcendent realities were not merely conjectural, but literally meaningless, as they could not be verified through experience. By applying this rigorous, scientific standard to philosophy, he aimed to dismantle the influence of the conventional, conservative establishment that he viewed as lacking empirical foundation.2134