Further Exploration of Religious Language - The Verification Principle

The topic of religious language questions whether or not religious language holds any meaning and if it is effective or not. Scholars have postulated theories as to what makes language meaningful or not, such as the verification principle.
Ferdinand de Saussure, a Swiss Linguist, believed that language was made of three components - a sign, a signifier and a signified. A sign is the word itself (e.g. "chair"), the signifier is the components that create the word ("c-h-a-i-r"), and the signified is the concept (knowledge of what a chair actually is). Saussure argued that without knowledge of all three components then communication that was both effective and meaningful could not be achieved.
This presented a large problem to religious language due to the nature of the concept of God. Although all parties may be aware of the sign, "God", and the signifier, "G-o-d", when discussing God, they all may have a different concept (signified) of God. This means that they are not communicating about God in a meaningful way, as they are all thinking of different things (whether those be small or large differences).
However, it could be argued, using Kant's theory of conceptual schemes, that every individual has an innate knowledge of God. This seemingly fixes the problem created by the nature of language, but creates the problem of trapping God as a concept alone. All of this raises the question as to whether or not it is meaningful to talk about God at all.

Logical positivists believe that something is true if it can be positively verified through empirical evidence, and that only true statements can hold meaning, paired with a belief that meaning is derived from the objective, factual significance of the statement. Using the verification principle, logical positivists are led to the conclusion that God-talk (talking about God in a meaningful way), is impossible. The verification principle states that if a statement is neither analytically nor empirically verifiable, it says nothing about reality and is therefore meaningless. Because statements about God cannot be verified, they are considered meaningless. This is not a question of whether or not they are true or false, but that if they cannot be shown to be true or false then it is meaningless to consider them.

AJ Ayer initially argued that statements were either analytically or synthetically true, and so were either true by definition or verified through empirical evidence. However, this caused problems as there are very few statements which can be completely verified through evidence, which Ayer would like to accept, such as the Big Bang Theory. He therefore revised this, arguing that statements that were potentially verifiable or falsifiable could also hold meaning. This corrected the problem caused by his first argument, but caused almost the opposite problem in that nearly every statement could be potentially verified or falsified. This prompted a response from John Hicks, who argued that statements about God possessed meaning as they were eschatologically verifiable (verifiable in the 'end times').

Hicks and Swinburne both suggest that statements about God hold meaning, and can be discussed (whether they be potentially verifiable or eschatologically so). This suggests the contrary to Ayer - that "God-talk is evidently not nonsense" (Swinburne). Aside from this, meaning seems to derive from many different things, leaving Ayer's argument logically sound but seemingly meaningless itself.