Sense and Reference

If God transcends the world and everything in it, then claims that God exists cannot be shown to be false. We need an inquiry into whether verificationism underestimates the variety of language games that occur and/or overlooks the possibility that there is more than one conceivable paradigm in terms of which the world might be understood.

It would be improper to suggest that the notion of divine "transcendence"  was invented solely to get God off the evidential hook.  A claim that cannot be shown to be false (because its subject matter transcends one) equally cannot be shown to be true (because its subject matter still transcends one). This historically has led to the assertion that such a claim is nonsensical.

Traditionally, the meaning of a proposition is understood in terms of the sense and the reference of its terms and phrases.  

A word or descriptive phrase might fail to have a sense for any number of reasons.  Some such as, "the square root of 11 sleeps late except on Tuesdays" and "she entered the room in a flood of tears and a sedan chair," are fairly trivial.  Others such as, "human beings are made of two kinds of stuff - body and mind" are not trivial at all.  But all are nonsensical.

When crucial terms and phrases in putative assertions either happen to have no sense or can have no sense, for whatever reason, the potential truth or falsehood of the sentence-like strings in which they occur vanishes and with it, all possibility of knowledge, pro or con.  Absent the possibility of testing, the utterance is "sophistry and illusion" according to Hume and "strict nonsense" according to the logical empiricists but with the consolation, according to A.J. Ayer, that "while they cannot be true, they cannot be false, either"

This analysis originally targeted philosophy's "metaphysics," but it splashes over onto ethical discourse, too.  Exactly the same thing holds for religious talk.  Literalists' religious talk passes muster as meaningful, though often false.  Transcendentalists' religious' talk, however does not pass.

Reference & sense