Christians and other religious people often point to their holy books as a source of moral guidance for the world, but to Richard Dawkins they are not necessary.
Speaking at the Jaipur Literature Festival in India, the God Delusion author argued that moral values can be found in secular places.
“We are the 21st century moralists and atheists,” he said, according to Indo-Asian News Service.
“We don’t need to get morals from our religions … We don’t want to find morals from the holy books. We can have our own enlightened secular values.”
Dawkins has been consistent and outspoken in his criticisms of religion and belief in God, deeming both to be the source of many of the world’s problems.
He was at the literary festival to talk about his 1976 classic, The Selfish Gene, in which he develops Darwin’s theory of evolution and argues that altruism is naturally occurring.
During his session, he suggested that belief in science and the creator God were incompatible.
"We still don't know what exactly happened at the time of the Big Bang, 13.72 billion years ago. Cosmologists and physicists now have good ideas which are yet to be proved definitely, that the whole universe came into being as a quantum event out of literally nothing," he said, according to the Times of India.
"This leaves religion with nowhere to go. Because however difficult it may be to explain the origin of the cosmos, it would be even more difficult to explain the origin of a designer who made the cosmos.
“So you have absolutely nothing to gain by postulating any kind of intelligent designer, because that simply evades the question we're trying to solve. If you want to believe in some kind of god, don't look to science."