Java is better than C for the following reasons :
1) Application Development:
Java is good candidate for developing
* Web(Spring, Play), Mobile (Android, Blackberry), Big Data Applications (Hadoop), even machine learning programs, which serves its purpose far better than any other language.
* Community adoption
* Out of box, mature, stable set of framework ecosystem e.g Spring Tool Suit, Apache Spark
* Open source projects and plenty of libraries
* Stable and streamlined
* Easy to port across platform
While C++ is better candidate for software development ranging from system softwares to general purpose applications.
2) Productivity:
Java gives feeling of instant productivity for developer as most of things are abstracted like memory management, pointers, build process. Also there are great development tools (so called IDE's) available for java like IntelliJ, Eclipse to make java application development easier.
3) Computer Science or Language Design:
I heard from the one of professor that, Java is much better language than C++ in terms of design aspects. For an instance "friend function in C++" don't you think its breaking the rule OOP encapsulation and over rated feature in C++? Design aspect, OOP philosophy of java is much better than C++. As java evolved later than C++ it tried to address pitfalls of C++ from early stage.