Give me an example of non-relative importance.

But the distinction is silly. Organisms impart importance to things, events, etc. Universal importance is difficult (if not impossible) to demonstrate. That was Kagan's point.

 I believe William Lane Craig wore his ass for a hat instead. That's what happens when Yale goes up against Cornfield University. I can't wait for the Sam Harris debate where William Lane Craig will disappear into his own ass out of embarrassment, leaving only an asshat on the stage.

He doesn't debate. He preaches and bold faced lies.

You can't reason or debate with such a lying and unethical person.

In this debate with Louise Antony, he opens with an outright lie (just 2 minutes in) about atheists agreeing that God 'IS' necessary for morality. This is NO slip of the tongue.

"If by morality, you mean that certain things are really good, or evil, that certain actions are unconditionally obligatory, or impermissable, then many atheists and theists alike agree, that God, is indeed necessary for morality." :  William Lane Craig
 

He defaults right there, by the logical fallacy that 'atheists' believe in gods.

He's not interested in being honest.

He's a lying fucking con man, and he's got a licence to get pair to spread lies at the University level in schools.

http://www.veritas.org/Media.aspx#!/v/4

It might be worth noting that the Kagan/Craig thing wasn't a debate. From Craig's Q&A stuff over a year later:

"I did respond briefly to Prof. Kagan's view, Alexander, but I didn't press the point because our hosts with the Veritas Forum had made it very clear to me that they were not interested in having a knock-down debate but a friendly dialogue that would foster a warm and inviting atmosphere for non-believing students at Columbia. The goal was simply to get the issues out on the table in a congenial, welcoming environment, which I think we did.

By the way, the curious thing about the view that Kagan defended is that it is not really his view at all! He is a radical consequentialist, who holds that the moral value of our actions is determined solely by the consequences of our actions. He believes that we are morally required to perform any action, no matter what it is, if it will eventually lead to the best result overall, the best defined in terms of human flourishing. If torturing and raping a little girl leads to greater human well-being in the end, then that's what you're morally obligated to do. Kagan admits that this sort of consequentialism is not only widely rejected by ethicists but is wildly implausible as well. I suspect that's why he chose not to articulate and defend his real views in our dialogue but to affect a position he himself regards as false, namely, the view that the moral thing to do is whatever ideally rational persons would agree one ought to do."

Here's the full response: http://www.reasonablefaith.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=7259

Looks like a strawman to me. I would not trust Craig's summary of his opponents' positions. It's not even consistent to say that Kagan subscribes to a moral philosophy that he considers wildly implausible. If the debate was any indication at all, I would think that Kagan understands the subjectivity of morality and merely prefers consequentialism as a pragmatic tool, maybe a combination of act and rule utilitarianism.

 If Craig thinks that humans cannot have free will if their choices are biologically determined, then doesn't it also follow that God (whom he is on record as describing as being "by definition good" ) also can't have free will because his actions are logically determined?  

He seems to be a determinist vis a vis God, so unless he embraces the compatibilist position (which he rejects in the debate) then he is saying that all morality is founded on a being who is not himself a moral agent.

"""""I personally didn't get the impression you all say you got after watching the debate. Dr. Kagan, while, granted, a very educated man, never seems to cede to Craig's point that, on atheism, the feelings of homo sapiens does not matter because ultimately homo sapiens do not matter"""""

This is a non-sequitir. You are including implicit premises which you have not stated. You must, using non-question-begging arguments, support three contentions to defend your argument:

1. If there will exist a future time when something will not exist, it does not ultimately matter

2. If X does not ultimately matter, a property of X does not ultimately matter.

3. If Y does not ultimately matter, Y does not matter  

"""""(bear in mind, on atheism, the feelings of homo sapiens become ultimately reduced to merely firings of complex electrical nervous systems in mammals"""""

This is a confusion of atheism and eliminative materialism, which are not the same thing.

"""""Yes, Dr. Kagan, we get that relatively, the feelings of pain and suffering matter (particularly to those which are at the mercy of them), but why, if the universe begins with no intention of bringing about mankind, and if mankind will ultimately cease to exist due to the inevitable heat death of the universe, why, on atheism, should we think that anything that happens between these two events even matters?"""""

This position includes an implicit premise

1. If I have not provided reaons for believing that a moral proposition is true, it must be false

However, (1) is self-refuting, because it is itself a moral proposition that you have not provided reasons for believing, so by itself, it must be false.

"""""Agreed. Of course they matter to us here and now. That isn't disputed. What is disputed is whether a rationally justified, coherent system of ethics can be built on how we feel, here and now. If all that ethics is is just a system of behavioral governance which is, at bottom, based on how we feel, then that seems to flip on its face our ideas of justice, right and wrong, etc. The prisoner's term now becomes, not a stretch of time of punishment because he has done something wrong, but an incarceration due to having been caught doing something which made someone feel a certain way- and since that person's feelings happen to be one which the populace seem to all agree to disdain, the majority has decided to lock this man up. Notice, however, they have shifted ground. They are no longer locking him up because he has done something wrong, but rather because he has done something unpleasant. When we justify behavior like this, the least we can do is be honest with ourselves and concede to the mistake."""""

This pre-supposes that the unpleasantness to the victim combined with the circumstances involved is itself insufficient to make the act "wrong". Or equivalently, that "really wrong" means something more than that. It is a question-begging argument.

 """""When we say something is good, or something is bad, we are not referring to anything more than our feelings, if atheism is true, because if atheism is true, the "good" we feel is nothing more than some sort of evolutionary trait we've developed throughout our history. """""

This confuses moral epistemology with ontology. If our feelings are how we make a moral claim, that does not mean that the content of the claim is itself just our feelings.

"""""Well, yes, BobSpence1, you're right. Those ephemeral activities are important to us "in the here and now", of course. But the debate was on morality. If everything is fleeting, temporal and ultimately purposeless, then this will pose a serious philosophical problem for our system of ethics (not to confuse it with a serious social problem; I personally don't think that, in a world where everyone is an atheist, crime rates would skyrocket, etc like most Christians seem to claim they believe) because they then become unfounded. """""

This suffers from the same problem as your first argument. It also makes another implicit assumption which has not been justified by you, namely

4. God's nature can exist without a foundation external to itself, but morality cannot.

So again your argument fails.

"""""Again, of course torture provides an immediate example of why we ought to think things matter relatively, but Kagan's point to defend (or at least explain) was why, after realizing what atheism necessarily entails, we ought to regard as important those feelings of the torture victim. Please don't misunderstand my point here. I am not saying that unless you believe in God, nothing matters, including torture. What I'm getting at is that if there is no God, then anyone that says we ought to do things in a particular way immediately must bear the burden of explaining why (ontologically) their new ethic is somehow an expression of how things ought to be. What is important here is not morality epistemologically, but ontologically. And this just does not seem to have an adequate explanation, on atheism at least. The most we've come up with is a sort of social contract theory, but it's clear that it isn't objective at all."""""

Saying something is obvious is not an argument. It obviously is not obvious to all of us, or we wouldn't be having this discussion. Prove that social contract theory is not objective. I think Kagan did a fine job at explaining how we know that it is.

 You have not made a single good (that is, convincing) argument that objective moral values cannot exist if there are no deities.