there is no intrinsic value, and therefore valuing is required as a finite process among other, succeptible to context and change, and because of that capable of progressing.
So you conclude "there may be value depending on the context"; if this is so, then only one who has educated oneself about
the entire diversity of contexts and the whole of history can say that he has the correct "finite process" for valuation. So this path to knowledge obviously involves learning about the other worlds and those
rational beings of a different and higher kind. You also would eventually have to realize that the world in which we live is not the only one in which we shall live or have lived, and that there are contexts presently unknown to you. This very line of reasoning denies humanism, and it is a problem for the nihilist because according to secular scholars, "all
rational atheists are humanists" (unless you are some oddball French philosopher from the 20th century). The nihilist needs a wide diversity of contexts in order to have a complete glimpse into the valuation problem, therefore any educated discussion of these contexts will turn to
the subject of extraterrestrials, etheric beings, and the like.
I think that your version of nihilism is nothing new;
In place of the old morality, we will get the new morality-one that's more relevant-namely that "nothing is real except our world of desires and passions," as Friedrich Nietzsche phrased it in his book Beyond Good and Evil. Formally, this philosophy is not called pluralism, but secular humanism. The problem Christians have with secular humanism is not that it is truly pluralistic, but that it subjects man to the sentimentality and enthusiasms of the moment. Indeed, history has shown that secular humanism - the view that man is the sole judge of the world, including morality, the shape of society, and the value of the individual - is very bad for humanity.
The assumption that is required in your argument is that human knowledge of value can progress, but this is dependent on
humanism, the idea that man is the sole judge of all things.
How can you say that man's knowledge of value
can progress unless man himself is the judge of that progress?
In another context, man may find himself giving up those values that were (somehow) discerned ex-nihilo and instead return his free will to GOD and live by faith according to the rules given unto mankind for the total transformation of the species (true progress).
The full context of man's existence provides a solid case for rejecting humanism, and I have made it quite a bit stronger by providing you these two valuable links above. Both the educated thinker and the mystic would say that it is MAN who has no unity within himself, and not the world.
To take values as fixed, therefore only blocks the potential progress of values and robs them of their rational basis, that they always possess in some form. It doesn't even mean there isn't an objective basis of values, just that they aren't inherent to mere objectivity itself. As an analogy, we can take mathematics, that has an objective basis, yet isn't inherent in things themselves, but has to be created in order to describe them.
It is good that you bring up the rational basis of values in the context of objectivity; one philosopher has said:
Thinking is mans only basic virtue, from which all the others proceed. And his basic vice, the source of all his evils, is that nameless act which all of you practice, but struggle never to admit: the act of blanking out, the willful suspension of ones consciousness, the refusal to thinknot blindness, but the refusal to see; not ignorance, but the refusal to know. It is the act of unfocusing your mind and inducing an inner fog to escape the responsibility of judgmenton the unstated premise that a thing will not exist if only you refuse to identify it, that A will not be A so long as you do not pronounce the verdict It is. Non-thinking is an act of annihilation, a wish to negate existence, an attempt to wipe out reality. But existence exists; reality is not to be wiped out, it will merely wipe out the wiper. By refusing to say It is, you are refusing to say I am. By suspending your judgment, you are negating your person. When a man declares: Who am I to know? he is declaring: Who am I to live?
Since values have a rational basis, it is sensible to ground our highest virtue in thinking, and the highest evil would be to refuse to know about other contexts of knowledge and values; therefore, only a sufficiently diverse education can allow the potential for the progress of values.